Aug 06, 2020 City Council on 2020-08-06 8:30 AM (SPECIAL CALLED WORK SESSION)

Welcome everybody to this special called Work Session of the Denton City Council on Thursday, August the 6th, 2020. We do have a quorum so I'll call this meeting to order is 8 33 a.m. Our first item and only item on this Work Session report is Work Session 1a, receive a report, hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding the FY 2020-21 City Manager's proposed budget capital improvement program and five-year financial forecast but I understand we have some departmental budget presentations that we weren't able to get to last time that we're going to cover I believe first is that correct okay all right that's correct all right you bet staff you may proceed thank you good morning mayor city council members nick vincent assistant director of finance I'll do a brief introduction this morning to introduce you to the presentations that we have coming forward to you today and then we'll turn it over to gary pack and they go over parks and recreation so on august the fourth we had a few departmental presentations that are rescheduled for today parks and recreation engineering legal water wastewater solid waste and then lastly later today we'll get to the city manager's proposed budget hopefully everybody received their proposed budget book yesterday afternoon and you have that for the meeting today if you did it I have some extra copies there's also a pdf file available on the city's website as a reminder the water and wastewater and solid waste utility are getting presented today and these are a two-part presentation the first half of the presentation is an operational discussion there'll be a question slide after that part of the presentation and then we'll go through the financial section with that I will turn it over to gary packen to present parks and recreation mayor city council gary packen director parks and recreation here today to talk to you about our proposed budget uh the image on the screen that you see right now is one of the highlights for the year was the acquisition of property on mills a little over 70 acres of heavily forested area with a pond you can see they have verified there are fish in that pond and look forward to that you know long-term plan for that property over the course of the year it's been really a multi-personality type of of year for us specifically with with the pandemic but at the same time we've been able to accomplish quite a bit during that time frame and balancing the pandemic at the same time from a park standpoint we were just about finished with the urban forest master plan that city council has been presented we'll be coming back to you in the near future for adoption of that our subsidy and resource allocation study took a lot of time throughout our entire organization to complete ipm naming policy we put together a five-year cip plan that we took to park board that we'll be bringing to council in the near future and we continue to work on our parks recreation trails master plan as i mentioned the mills property is a major acquisition for us we completed and opened the dog park in december we continue to improve some beautification opportunities dallas and teasley specifically was completed this year alh in the tennis center are both under construction the tennis center is actually moving on at a very fast pace and it's well ahead of schedule so that's exciting we replaced the fishing pier at north lakes based on a council request we completed we're in the process of completing two new parks and we replaced six playgrounds and we're in the process of designing another handful that would wrap up our 2014 bond program for playgrounds and really help us catch up on our playground replacement plan we've been a few years behind and getting that replaced so we're trying to get caught up bowling green and skiles are two of our playgrounds that do need replaced we've had requests from the community about that so we've we've elevated those to get those done sooner we did a cdbg program at carl young senior park for restroom we're replacing all of our athletic scoreboards during the pandemic we updated and renovated our leisure pool at the natatorium since it was closed that was good timing we actually got good pricing on that as well and we continue to work on some tech stock grants we have been working on a number of new initiatives our land we're starting a land management program within parks maintenance that's part of our city-wide program obviously our forestry efforts are going to be elevating in our environmental opportunities we've created a mrt which is a mowing response team for the cemeteries we've had a lot of challenges with our cemeteries with our contractors because they're they're difficult to mow and maintain and time consuming so we're going to take that on internally like we used to and then also mow high profile areas we've had some challenges with mowing wildflowers with some of our contractors this past year and we continue to look at green equipment throughout our park system whether it's electronic mowers or even autonomous mowers future goals obviously adoption of our parks master plan as well as we're kicking off southwest park master plan and we're doing plans for villages of carmel and bowling green so those are shovel ready and we possibly go after some grants and we want to try to start planning for an inclusive playground it's been a few years since that's been discussed but we'd like to get that that process moving forward we've made significant project progress on our 9 15 16 ordinance in partnership with our development community that did take a hiatus during the pandemic and we're actually as of last week started dusting that off and getting that back so we can get at the park board up up to city council and then we have a lot of work that we're doing internally on land acquisition both for purchasing through bond money as well as through efforts with developments we'll be coming to council in august later later this month with some more information that on on land acquisition park improvements we hope to getting mckenna park bit out here real soon bowling green park with some trail enhancements and making the um the gardens uh the community gardens ada accessible with a trail uh southlake park southlakes park quaker town park mac joe skiles all receive receiving renovations and then lake force park dam and dredging uh we're just about ready to go out this fall for for bids on that i had mentioned our city-wide mowing effort this has been a really a city-wide effort there's 11 departments overall that have been involved in mowing in some form or fashion that's not their primary goal and objective for their department so we're bringing that all under one house as well as the billing and the overall management for that so that should make us much more effective and and hopefully help the contractors as well we're working diligently to complete the 2014 bond program and get things lined up for the 2019 program once funding is available for us that's out in 21 and 22 i believe as of right now and then we continue working with development services and engineering and the mobility plan and our community partners to continue to plan and develop our trail system that's the one thing in our parks master plan we've been pretty heavy working on over the course of this past year from a leisure services standpoint obviously our last four or five months have been heavily dealing with covet related activities reopening plans dealing with day-to-day challenges it has been a constant change you know sometimes on the hour but that's been a major portion of our time there we did have to re redevelop our business so we launched a virtual recreation center and put a lot of our programs online so that that was a major challenge for our staff and i i really can commend them for changing directions on a dime we have reopened some facilities for our users and we put a plan together for reopening of all of our facilities at some point in time partnerships have been extremely important to us with disd our summer food program unt rotary club library foundation unt are some of the program partners we've been working on during this pandemic we really switched from an in-person recreational provider to a social service agency we operated a hygiene station at the civic center pool while that was closed we assisted many non-profits in day-to-day operations and volunteer management and we've offered operated in clement weather station as well when the temperatures are getting above 100 degrees for future goals for recreation just a couple highlights there obviously relaunching all of our facilities in a safe manner we are working on our accreditation we need to get our master plan adopted and approved before we can move forward on that we are working to realign some staff to create some efficiencies between kdb the civic center our internal and external events and our educational opportunities creating one focus group on that effort so that's exciting opportunity for us and then we're also been working with economic development on our public art implementation a majority of those pieces are obviously a plan for our park system and moving forward marketing will be a major part rebuilding all of our businesses and getting people back into our programs and our facilities so obviously we talked a lot about change parks and recreation from a park standpoint we we haven't been busier people have been going outside and using our parks our parks beginning getting extreme heavy use we have significant reductions both of the vsp and frozen positions and then we're also short a mowing contractor which created a lot of challenges so while being short staffed we had to go out and mow the parks so keeping up with the grass has been challenging express especially when it was raining earlier in the spring we did spread staff out pretty thin to keep them safe in smaller groups and that did impact our service levels but the expectations from the community were still the same so we tried to do our best to keep up with that so that's been a change for us but at the same time we've had an extremely aggressive approach on our park planning and our trail planning efforts in in that development with the community the development community that is our land acquisition and our park development and impact fees has been a major part of our planning efforts and then obviously the the city-wide ipm and overall land management has been a major change for us leisure services actually department-wide we implemented a staff accountability through job success profiling in october and then we've been transitioning to remote work working a lifestyle for everybody during this process and it's worked out fairly well as i mentioned we changed from an in-person recreational provider to more of a social service agency and that's been a little bit of a challenge for us but staff has reacted very well and and done a great job we do need to rebuild our businesses for all our facilities and we'll be working on our reopening plan as well as looking at each program from a cost recovery standpoint in a subsidy process as we reopen we've made a number of organizational structure adjustments which i'll share with you in a second but the biggest issue is what does our business look like post-covid which which we will work through as as it comes service level changes we've talked a lot about most of this already we do have one recreation center open it's limited to members only at this point in time when we're starting to implement some small programs offering to regrow that effort our mowing has been completed on a priority basis as opposed to based on classification just trying to keep the grass short we did have some projects we're on delayed but we tried to keep as much as we could moving forward as possible and then obviously we've had a significant increase in our park usage this spring and summer reopening plan we've we've shared updates with you as we progress through that process as i've mentioned earlier we have contracted programs that are starting to implement in small groups exercise programs at north lakes recreation center we we plan to open an auditorium originally we're thinking august 15th but the school has not released when they plan on officially starting indoor facilities so that's still pending but we're getting ready for that and then we're looking to reopen mlk junior recreation center in september and then obviously continue with the civic center denia and the senior center would probably open at the end of the year if not the first of the year based on demand as well as health conditions some of the programs that are delayed or cancelled after school action site is delayed at this point in time our senior programs obviously be the last ones that we restart in special events as well our full-time preschool as of right now we don't anticipate that restarting there's a number of service providers that provide that option our cost recovery on that was was fairly low on the on the lower end of our pyramid and we're looking at how we could use that space in other ways to really maximize programming opportunities our revenues as a whole obviously we're going into the year with a lot of questions we have some facilities that we know are not going to open in the first quarter and we know that when we open the doors we're not going to be back to pre-covid numbers so what we've done with this approach is we've removed all the revenues from the facilities that are closed through the first quarter and we reduced the rest of our revenues by 25 percent as a placeholder we look at our budget on a regular basis and every month we'll be updating our revenues and expenses so we can communicate that with finance and plan accordingly trying to balance our revenues and expenses if things are delayed obviously our revenues won't be there but we'll also have additional expenses to go along with that in conjunction with that we have reduced some of the expenses but not all of them so we're a little heavier on our expenses so we should see benefits from both sides if if things are delayed or not or do not open on time schedules of fees at this point in time we're not recommending any any significant changes the only two things we're recommending are reductions a few years ago we had a cemetery burial permit for late fees instituted at five hundred dollars that was really to discourage people from last-minute planning and try to get some pre-planning efforts going we're reducing we'd like to reduce that down to 100 and then completely eliminate this cemetery stone permit late fee and then just some wording clarifications in regards to the burial permit going from going to 24 business hours to 48 hours notice it's just a little confusing for people so just minor changes there our FTEs talk a little bit about this we started 1920 budget with 164 we're proposing to to in this year's budget 161 FTEs obviously that's a significant of see a significant number of seasonal time we did have 84 vacant FTEs this year and obviously majority that is our seasonal staff we have been approved for the 73 replacements again majority of that is seasonal but we have been approved for 8.6 8.16 new FTEs six six of the six FTEs are for our new mowing efforts both our our land management and our and our mowing response team and then we're transferring two of the KDB employees that were located in the solid waste budget over to parks and recreations budget so that's an increase there although they've been working for us we are still short 11 positions pre-COVID and some of those will be coming back to the CMO committee for future fillings once we reopen some additional facilities so from an org chart perspective the items in blue light blue we have been approved to refill the items in yellow the ones that are still frozen the green and orange are the land management team for land manager and the field supervisor will be overseeing all the city-wide mowing and the contracts associated with that and then the orange will be that mowing response team that will be mowing the cemeteries as well as special areas and that will allow us to reduce some expenses from our contracts as well from a leisure services profile again all the yellow are positions that are frozen so there's a lot of yellow on the screen that's because we don't have a lot of facilities open at this point in time and that some of those will be requested in the near future and then the light blue ones are seasonal positions that will slowly start to bring in to help expand our programs and then balance our reopening efforts our revenue budget as a whole just give you some some update from 1920 we're at 2.3 million dollars in the general fund revenues and this year we're proposing at 1.8 million dollars again going back to that previous slide we anticipate some facilities not reopening during the first quarter and then we have just a blanket reduction across the board of all of our facilities the natatorium and the water park obviously would hopefully be open the entire year they open on time and next spring and hopefully by then people are a little bit more acclimated to the environment and willing to come back and use those facilities and this is just a roll up from the general fund expenses by category here again it's about a three hundred thousand dollar increase the personnel services have gone up a little bit those are the new new employees the new fte's that i had mentioned earlier everything else is pretty much flat as as they were in 1920 and then general fund expenses by division the park maintenance has gone up roughly three hundred thousand dollars from 1920 to 2021 and that's because of the new positions and then kdb is new to the park's general fund budget coming from solid waste so that's an increase for that staffing and then overall the recreation fund we do show a dip in our revenues if you look at 1920 we're at 2.2 on the rec fund side we're at 1.8 obviously that is to accommodate the closures and a slow reopening there's a two percent increase over the next few years obviously it's taking time to rebuild that we surely hope and that we can rebuild that program much faster than two percent um and then from an expense side down on the bottom half we're at 6.7 last year and we're proposed at 6.5 this year so we're actually reduced some of our expenses as well we do feel that's still a little heavy and then we'll see some savings as we move through the budget year and again we'll be looking at that on a month-to-month basis and at that time mayor council i can open up for any um i can open up for any questions that you may have and i'll take okay i'll take this screen down sure all right council members uh briggs uh melzer and davis thank you mayor um i have a one one main question um i thought that we were moving sustainability under parks but i didn't see it at all in this uh budget or fte's the programming part of sustainability is being moved to parks the environmental services part of sustainability is staying with dr banks uh in the utility side so we're actually looking at expanding that environmental services group a little bit along with the rules and duties so ethan and gary are working that through right now um okay uh the the fte's and the expenses are still in the utilities budget at this time so we're working from that budget but they are coming over to parks and recreation okay um another question you mentioned the the preschool would not be opening up in the after after school care um i know you might not have those numbers now but i'm curious um how many students were enrolled in that uh preschool and after school care because i know that although we're not opening um other things are going forward which means that those are actually services families used that will not be available um so i'm just i'm curious about that yes so our our after school and preschool is is obviously a challenge for us right now just as the summer camps were you know a big need for the community as well um we we've we've continued to look at the preschool um the deania facility was making progress uh in regards to its use i think they were up to nine nine people at one time 12 is our max um m.l.k. had had four or five at that time um it's on the lower end of our cost recovery scale um but in in addition to the after school program act after school action sites obviously people are heavily dependent on that um and we're trying to balance safety and being able to have kids in one location and we we've erred to the side of not providing that similar to what we did with the the daycare we are looking at ways that we can use that space uh with more use across the community right now that space is is basically reserved for anywhere you know maximum of 12 people but we haven't been at capacity at any point in time that i'm aware of uh in the recent future so we're looking the to allow that to be shifted to the private sector there's a lot of other social service providers that do provide that in private sector as well that provide that service uh and to redirect that to to them so we could use that space for other efforts well i certainly hope or i asked that that come back to council for discussion um before that decision is made i know that you mentioned that the cost recovery is low but as a as a parent um that preschool was more affordable in the city um than a lot of other ones around so it does it did provide a service although may not for a large group of people um it did provide one for some may i just i have one more question about the mowing contracts um because i know that we recently approved a mowing contract and i did read the footnote that cis was coming over um so i'm i'm curious how many total mowing contracts that we're going to manage as well as hire six new people to do that um what what number does that provide um in the city for mowing and grass and so um we have a few contracts in parks cis had a different contractor so eventually we're going to try to get them all in sync uh so we have them all coming at one time and expiring and coming on board at one time the um the contract that you saw earlier this summer we hired a new contractor they worked for about a month um i think they bit off more they could chew and they quit um so we had to pick up that effort so we're we had to go out and re-bid that to try to get somebody under contract because we couldn't keep up with it um so that is going to be coming to you in the very near future but ultimately we are going to be taking some things out of the contracts that are being done in the cemeteries are two of those properties uh because they are so challenging with the headstones and the curbs for the plots um and weed whipping it takes contractors a lot and and i think that's where it's been it's been a challenge for those contractors and we've had to quit over the past couple years uh because of that so we decided that we're going to try taking this on ourselves and see if we can do a better job and make and allow those contractors to be more successful and really look at as a partnership moving forward uh we've had some great contractors when you do have a challenging contractor it it's extremely challenging so there's a balance there but we're trying to get everything eventually lined up it'll probably take us a year to get everybody in sync with the contracts uh and get those reduced but at the same time we can't we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket with a contractor if they have a change in business or they sell or or someone uh just outright you know shuts down their business that could put us in a real bind so we're trying to create some diversity in splitting things up based off of the type of mowing if it's a right away mowing or if it's a highly detailed mowing uh location for a class a there's different contractors that focus on different things with different types of equipment so we can't just have one contractor so we'll have a handful of contracts moving forward to give us that diversity but at the same time constantly look at how we can be more specific over the past two years we've gone down to square feet of turf in the past it was more general space of a park so they were actually bidding out you know buildings or rooftops or or asphalt or concrete for parking lots we have it down to a square footage now so they're they're bidding exactly what we're asking them to do so we've really fine tuned that effort and we continue to do that and look for efficiencies and how we can save uh resources okay thank you council member melzer yeah i'm glad we're not mowing the parking lots anymore um gary uh that um i mentioned that i thought the six and a half million was was uh a little heavier than you hope it'll be on the expense side i'm just curious to hear what your thoughts are about where the opportunities might arise over the course of the year and kind of what the gating factors are that you'll be looking for so uh so from the expense standpoint um we did reduce some of the seasonal costs from the facilities that were closed that that's a major line item for us um so those are in the budget but if we decide not to open let's say the senior center for an additional two months uh they're the expenses are loaded in there assuming they're opening in january if we decide to not open denia until the spring then those would be additional savings as well we're trying to reduce our utilities usage in all the buildings since we're not in there so we've cut back there water you know garbage everything from those perspectives as much as we can and then as programs launch or don't relaunch there'll be a say there'll be savings there as well we are trying to use our full-time staff as much as we can for all of our services before bringing back uh part-time people we will need part-time staff or seasonal staff to help regrow and open facilities and those will slowly be added but for instance right now north lakes is being run by 100 of our full-time staff to save money because we had them on board and we've been trying to preserve our full-time staff thank you very much council member davis thank you mayor gary you uh you've answered my questions already in your responses the last one i have remaining is i know that those part-time seasonal jobs we primarily report and record as uh work hours man hours do you know about how many um actual employees individuals uh that affected the seasonal jobs are so great for people on a certain stage of life or a certain you know situation college students high school students so do we know how many of those have been affected by the shutdowns we've had to do um i'm going to say it's a couple hundred i'm looking to heather to see if she has that exact answer or a closer number it's about 200 uh seasonal employees that we have obviously that peaks and valleys in the summertime we do have five permanent part-time staff members that have been what been with us throughout this entire time they work 20 hours a week but that seasonal staff are the ones the college students that have been coming back or or students or people that are just working for you know 1500 hours a year that we really depend on to operate a lot of our facilities and oftentimes are our frontline service providers and customer service representatives you know it's been a challenge for them and then obviously rehiring them because i'm sure a lot of them have gone to other places to find employment uh hopefully we can get them back uh if not we kind of have to start over and retrain staff obviously bringing new people back on board so that'll be a little bit of a challenge for us do we have i'm sure you don't have you know quantitative data on it but do we have anecdotally an idea of are those mostly college students who live here in denton year-round because they're able to find a job here during the summer are they folks who are maybe not enrolled in classes but are doing something part-time because it fits whatever else they're doing do we know those kind of things i i don't have the exact breakdown percentage wise but i know we depend a lot on on college students high school students and and then even professionals that are off during the summer you know i know a lot of some of the people that work at the pool and are in our concessions work in the cafeteria at the schools and they'll help us in the summer time so there are some people that use that to supplement you know full-time employment as well but obviously it's heavily dependent on seasonal summer staff which are most likely students sure thank you councilmembrometer uh thank you gary i wanted to just take a moment also to applaud uh the virtual recreation programs just how creative they are and uh just done at the last minute was just really wonderful i also want to thank you uh for the land acquisition efforts uh for moving to the dino dirt light in playgrounds for eliminating the burial late fees so i just a a couple uh quick questions and and then some just kind of short recommendations um about the cemeteries i was wondering if you could you know speak about um your uh our cooperation with the veterans hall of fame for the the marker program and if you've considered um partnering with with them and volunteers uh from veterans hall of fame for to help with cemetery maintenance i'm not volunteering them by the way i'm just just wondering if if exploring that partnership and if you could speak a little to that the marker program we haven't talked to them about maintenance um the cemetery is is is tough to to do um because of the the headstones and concrete and up and down off the curbs and all that uh we have worked with them over the past few years to install flags and markers i think they started with war war one veterans and they're progressing to uh the next step for world war two and i'm assuming that'll carry on to memorialize um those veterans and we've had discussions as far as you know creating a website where that information is hosted with qr codes where people could go out there and scan it and walk and just kind of have like a um a walk of of honor type deal where they could see a picture of the person what they did in service what they did in their life uh here and then the impacts they made in the community and and really that could go as far as everybody um you know it's it'd be a great way to preserve everybody's time on on this planet and and learn a little bit about people that they lived 100 years ago or or may have died as recently as last year so it it really could be an opportunity to really preserve denton's history not just with our veterans but with our community as a whole um that's going to take a significant effort uh we have talked about internally when people um have a burial if if people could you know put together a short bio about that person uh and then we could put it on a website and have that available uh we just haven't gotten there yet from a staffing standpoint to be able to dedicate that but maybe that's something that we can work with the library on uh but it's it's a really neat idea that they've started and we look forward to that you know kind of growing thank you i love that idea about doing that for everybody if you know for those who don't know it's a a program to scan where you can scan a qr code on on headstones uh and so it's just wonderful wonderful effort yeah you can use geofences so when you get close to that it pop up too so yeah yeah so thank you thank you so much um so i want to so in closing i want to um to echo uh what council member brig said about about child care you know of course i understand and applaud you know concerns for covid uh i would love to see you know moving forward um take kind of get a sense of uh what the what the needs for preschool are for city of denton families and how many uh small group you know socially distant small groups could our rec centers hold especially now considering that that a number of our rec centers are closed there's a there's more space than there was when they were we had open rec centers and uh child care going on with that uh so i also uh would you know encourage us to you know you you mentioned about the the private sector i know that some um child care providers in the child sector in the private sector are also having um financial struggles that a number of the people in the private sector are so maybe there are uh you know partnerships also that could be formed where we could provide some of what we have they could provide some of what we have and we could work together to meet social distance city needs within our budget so i'm i know it's a budget discussion but i'm just just mentioning you know i'm curious to know not necessarily now but moving forward you know whether that can be kind of included within within our budget um i was wondering and finally in closing uh are we considering uh you know using those uh closed rec centers or any rec centers for for voting uh for november and if so is that in the the budget would that would that be an extra item you could just speak to that briefly maybe that's not known at this point um i don't know about the rec centers we did open up the civic center for for voting uh in july during that process um but you know we'll we'll work with city staff and the county to provide whatever the services are needed um as as they're determined okay all right uh thank you uh mayor pro tem thank you and thank you gary i have a couple of things regarding the american legion uh hall i know we talked and it's a little off pace are they picking up i saw the foundation being forward yeah i i need to reach out to staff and see what the expected timeline at last i heard it was early spring um at this point in time that the the other concern is are we going to be able to open up our senior programs um you know on time in january based on on the pandemic and safety measures too so there's going to be need to be a balance there as well but i can follow up on a friday staff report with an updated timeline if you would please and then uh the mural still on pace for september there on robert robertson robertson street yes so um we are going to have a public meeting on september 3rd a virtual public meeting for the mlk sculpture as well as the mural on robertson uh to share those designs with the community and get some feedback if uh that is acceptable to the community and we'll move forward with getting those implemented we intended on having a public meeting literally the i think two days later two days after we closed and shut things down in march and obviously that's been on hold so we're at a point now we want to try to go ahead and have a public meeting we'll also provide the ability for people to call in if they need to or email us in regards to any questions or comments about that effort but we'd like to get that moving forward as as quickly as we can once we get that feedback from the community got it and then i just want to say i thank you and staff because we talked about it when it came around that contract and holding the contractor accountable and now even though we've had two i see that as a good thing because it means that you're monitoring those contracts and holding them accountable to what they bid to versus allowing them to kind of just willy-nilly it so i do appreciate that accountability and and that hard look at that if they if they bid it and they commit to it we need to hold their feet to the fire and i've said as much to i saw some of your employees work in the rail trail and said as much and i just appreciate your efforts there lastly mayor watts i just would ask or advocate that if we're gonna i just want to make sure we follow the process with respect with regards to a policy decision on the kids program because i think above all things parents do need a service but they need consistent service and so i i said it during the summer programs i think back to when i was utilizing that service as a single parent and i'm the inconsistency an inconsistency that could happen due to no fault of anyone working in that kid section just someone else is coming to play basketball there's a covid uh case or an outbreak we then have to close down that center now the parents have to scramble to find child care for two weeks until we can get back open or a week or whatever that is and that to me seems more alarming than saying early and often we're going to do away with this service because we can't provide it reliably or for whatever reason so i just think there's a policy discussion to be had there sure uh if we're going to take that up to make sure we send a consistent message and if we commit to parents that we're going to be open seven days a week for a period of time or six to five days a week we need to be able to commit to that and and i don't know that we're at that position okay yeah i think that's i think that's given it will come back probably for a policy discussion as they get further into uh discussing that issue uh anybody else uh council member briggs i forgot to ask the question about the inclusive playground um gary because i know that it has been a priority or it was um for for a while and i thought we were pretty close to it as we were discussing um some some of the parks can you just give us a little um because i know it was on our future goals how future do you think that will be and and also just as a request that it go through our committee on persons with disabilities i don't even know i don't know if it has gone through that committee yet um but i would like for it too great great question um so we uh originally when i when i started a few years ago it there was discussion about putting it at mckenna park um we talked with the park foundation and we talked with park board i think it was um about that location it's the one park we have with the most topography and just the concern about users to be able to get it get in and out of that facility in in the design and space of that that might that it requires we didn't feel that that was a good location so we we during the master planning process uh we have had some discussions and we we had a um an accessible an accessibility group uh public meeting uh and we specifically talked about locations for that uh we had we had looked at south or southwest park the new park that we're planning right now is a possible location the group as a whole didn't like that because it didn't have bus route at that point right now so they more they leaned more towards north lakes uh the north lakes playground eventually does need to be replaced in the near future it has exceeded its typical lifespan but since it's in the shade it's it's still in good shape um so the thought process is we have a lot of space there to to create a nice size fully inclusive play structure not just based on wheelchair bound individuals but uh mentally challenged individuals uh that would provide you know autistic opportunities as well those types of things across the entire spectrum and if we wanted to we could actually do plan for long term to have two locations one at north lakes in the north and one at southwest in south denton um but a facility of that nature you know grand prairie built one that they opened last year and they spent i think was over eight million dollars for that play structure so there's a wide span of that i i would anticipate that the probably cost of one and a half million dollars to do that so the thought processes was go ahead and start this year uh the planning for that effort get everybody involved in the entire community in that in that plan and then uh it probably would be a future bond initiative uh that we could plan for and have ready to go uh if the bond committee and city council seems uh that's proper that that was kind of our our mindset okay i appreciate that i'm gonna i'm gonna be a little bit more firm on trying to keep the discussions to um the budget because we've got a lot of information to cover today for this year's budget and i appreciate the policy questions and the policy uh discussions if if we can you know send those emails to the city manager so we can get those on on a agenda where we can talk about them more fully uh but really want to try to keep the discussions to the budgets because that's what we're talking about here so i really would appreciate the cooperation in that regard uh gary one question i have on the um let me look back at the slide the park's general fund expense by division at slide 15 uh i notice obviously there's a there's a large discrepancy between uh the budget for the aquatics and the estimate do those figures include debt service because i know that's part of our partnership with the isd where i think we we share the expenses or we we split the expenses and then we we pay our respective debt services do those figures include the city's debt service for those facilities for the water park uh mayor city council nick vinston assistant director of finance um that does not include debt service no answer your question okay uh if we could uh when we get down to the more comprehensive budget discussion i'm sure that we're going to be able to pull that but i'd like to we've had it in there in the past we pull it out we put it in we pull it out uh because for a lot of different reasons but i think we need to at least show somewhere with an asterisk or a footnote that these facilities we're still paying a debt service on them which is part of this particular kind of amenity that we offer to the community so it would just give us a more accurate representation of you know what what the community is paying for that amenity so if if as we move forward in the general budget discussion in the in the coming weeks and months if we could just you know asterisk that or or something so that the public will have an awareness of that we can do that we'll add a footnote to that slide okay thank you uh all right anybody else council member armature real quick and then we're going to move on yeah just quick just real quick a a budget question that is uh following up on council member bridge's question about inclusive parks um do we have it is there room in the current budget as planned to update our current parks as needed to make them more inclusive and if so um you know is that something that could come forward uh to the committee on persons with disabilities about what actually is needed to make all our parks more inclusive okay and that's there's a there's a there's a that's a that's a hybrid policy budget question so gary if you could answer the first part about um is there is there anything in the budget that provides accessibility to all of our parks and the second one we can take up at a different at a later time yeah so as we make improvements we're trying to focus on those opportunities to make sure that we're accommodating people of all abilities to to uh to uh to that level uh we do have an ada transition plan in our five-year cip forecast uh it's not it does i don't think that we have it starting next year but we do have it in there for a long term to look at all of our facilities and see where we need to improve okay thank you gary all right any other questions okay thank you very much for that thank you mayor you bet i believe the next one is um is it engineering good morning mayor and council morning tata's this city engineer let me get back over here to share screen morning uh capital projects department our proposed budget presentation just running through a few things that both we've accomplished this year or is in process or we're still working through those items uh we have over 220 million dollars in construction projects actively in construction so those are total project costs we still have quite a few that are going out the door the rest the remainder of this year as well as next year we also spent quite a bit of time this last year through the efforts of uh rachel wood and christine taylor revamping that development review process i'm sure you've heard some of that from scott mcdonough as well we've we've had a lot of success there turning that around that has been a a very good process that has been nailed down but it still has room for improvement and we are continuing to work through that in process one of the key milestones that we're we're looking to achieve here very quickly this year is the department and process improvement analysis we hired plant moran to take a look at just the where we are with the delivery of projects processes that we may be lacking because we have been very very busy trying to get things done we did not have as much time as we would have liked to really settle in on how do we do this better how we get these things done more efficiently do we have the appropriate personnel that process has been ongoing this summer so as we move into this fall we will have a better look at what that staff and those processes look like as we continue to just get better at putting these projects back out on the street and then coming here in the future still working towards implementing those processes and areas we need to work on as defined by the internal audit from earlier this year that gave us some good insight led to the plant moran hiring and helping us work through these issues our former program management office which was internal to capital projects has moved to finance so that's something that we're very excited about working more closely with the budget finance office with that group's efforts really have a better watch and coordination of those funds that are needed to make these projects go and then keeping them running some philosophical changes that we incurred this year so one of the big things was absolutely the pandemic occurred and that has changed some of our thought processes as we move forward we brought some more projects in-house than we had in the past brought a couple of in-house design technicians on board so we could increase that design capacity internal that helped as a byproduct to lower some of the design costs for these capital projects really keep these things where we want them to be on a cost perspective it does have a little bit of an increase to some schedules so we're being very picky and choosy about what is that project that goes through the internal design process and what projects are still external is there are just that much more in the way of resources that those consultants can bring to bear as opposed to so trying to minimize the opportunity cost where we can and take advantage of situations where we can and we also as part of that pandemic effort and our concerns early on where we didn't know what the financial picture was going to look like we had reached out to our consulting community and the renegotiated fees almost to every single one of those consultants they brought 10% 12% of their fees down and committed to that so we have seen that through our consulting community that desire to be here they understand what we're going with what we're going through it and they want to be a partner with us even on that front some of the other things that we are really working through are also on this slide communication is a key for us again we spent a lot of time working on getting projects out the door we definitely need to be much better at communicating what it is we're getting out the door how that looks like what it is the what are those issues that we're running into that's absolutely led into these monthly meetings that we kicked off in late june to bring council up to date on where we are with capital projects but that broadens out both to our internal departments that we work for as well as the customers the residents the business owners that we service on a daily basis that we that we're putting these projects out into the ground they've invested in and they have the most direct benefit from so it's communication on all fronts that we really want to focus on be a better partner as we deliver these projects service level changes in regard to the pandemic we really didn't see a huge dip in our capability to produce we had spent the last three years really getting our folks as mobile as possible that philosophy of you know construction happens outside it doesn't happen in your office so give people laptops give them the mobile technology they need to be out in the field to engage the public where they are to engage the contractor the design consultants that has paid off in an unexpected way you know the thought process originally was let's just be where the action is because that's how we're going to be more engaged in the project where we are today is that also enabled us to very quickly without loss in production get our staff to a point where they could work remotely those that could so preventing their exposure preventing the capacity for that one to four one to two exposure about any one person getting uh getting the disease and passing it on we're doing our part for those crews that did have to absolutely come in like our traffic operations division and our public works inspectors we made sure that they were appropriately kitted out for all of their ppe needs or their protection we made sure that for traffic operations they started working shifts so we have a fairly small group that allowed them to stagger their starts so one group would come in at seven another at 7 30 another at eight they still get all their time in they're still as productive as they were before but we're trying to keep everybody as appropriately spaced as we can especially when they're housed in a building as small as what they work in when they come through the door uh the other thing that we also made sure of is uh for public works inspections we had in the past been working towards your your vehicle is really your office because that is where the action is again it's out in the field we need you out there not in the building so they really took that to heart they've been doing that anyway so as soon as we right ran into the pandemic scenario it was very easy for us just hey guys i don't even need you to come in clock in use the app we'll make sure we're in touch uh they transitioned to parking lot meetings instead of coming into the building and having staff meetings so they've adapted very very well uh that's not to say that we aren't looking forward to having everybody back in the office when it's safe to do so we absolutely are but we have not seen a drop in production from our team and we've been able to carry on go forward few operational statistics here i won't highlight everything off of here but i would draw your attention to couplings first the big bar graphs on the left you see the 2012 and 2014 bond program if you notice those numbers do not correlate exactly to the number of streets in the street reconstruction program those are the total number of projects and those bond programs that have bonds attached to them so it's actually a higher number than just the street reconstruction part that is just a pure status update on where those projects sit so the more you see an orange it's completed the ones you see in that darker blue color that's under construction and then what we have in design left to complete and get out the door we're still anticipate all those items being out to construction next year at the latest so we are moving those things forward as expeditiously as possible one area that has shown some amazing improvements over the last year real estate with d cody and and her team really looking at the way they do business they've gone from a year ish on average to engage parcels acquire parcels and close those parcels for us to go to construction they've brought that down to about 200 days now and they're still working to improve that so that was an outstanding achievement they really brought that down one of the areas that we are absolutely concerned about is public works inspections we've talked about before that on capital projects the city's projects we like to have at least two hours on average per day and for those inspectors to be on site see what's going on and that's a minimum and then for the private development projects one hour a day on average where we are today because of vsp some losses there and just the sheer number of projects have come through the door we have a lot of projects right away applications have come in that takes their time they're not able to hit more than on average right around 30 to 40 minutes a day so that is something that we're looking to refill as quickly as we can but we're also looking through that plant moran process to help us identify if there's some more efficient ways of doing work that would also help us to get a little further along and really bring that average back up to where we'd like to see it close to a 1.4 1.5 per project across the board regardless of what it is and if you look at the right away permits that's another part of that public works inspections component they typically deal with about a thousand permits a year a little sometimes a little higher sometimes just a little bit lower there are only three people who are engaged in that process and one of the things that has been a huge time component for them that really impacts their ability to be where they need to be has been the intake of those permits the categorization of those permits and then managing the the payment of those permits that's being outsourced to development services it's one of those things that we have in process it's not fully in place but it would also give this the spin-off benefit that it continues to further the development services mantra of the one-stop shop so if i'm coming in for a permit i can get a permit for just about anything over the sun right there i'm not having to go find public works inspections and where they are located at the service center to try to make those permits happen so that that is in process right now that will free up quite a bit of time they're also looking at just how those people do their work could we be a little bit do that work a little bit more differently to get better efficiencies there and then last but not least on this slide development review we talked about that restructuring that remodeling the process improvement that christine and rachel really got engaged in this last year that contract that we have with hr green if you recall that has y'all had seen that last fall that has been 100 cost recoverable this year just as we had hoped as we'd gone down this process and our staff time has been between 85 and 95 cost recoverable the entire year so that's been fantastic to see in line with just what we're talking about with the development side and just to give you an indicator of what's going on with development you see here in april on the lower left hand side of your screen the total review types we saw a dip in april if you recall that that is the time frame that pnz was not considering any new plats coming through so we saw a dip there primarily to the new plats that were coming through for development as we move back into may and june and we started to receive those plats again absolutely we're right back to where we were before and then if you look at the bottom right hand of your screen again just a convergence of two things both a testament to what christine and rachel have been doing what development services have been engaged in and in us as a component of that but also the the bill that put a timeline that shot clock on development we have gone from average review time from 10 days to six five or less number of days i mean we've really cut that in in half or better on most cases so staff is very responsive the process seems to be working something we can really strive to continue to do just to walk you through an fte summary real quickly where we started the year we were actually started actually started the fiscal year at about 64 65 fte's but that group at pmo group at project program management office that has moved over to budget and finance so 59 is where we started 59 as we went through the vsp committee the recommendation knowing that this plant moran study was coming through their recommendation was let's hold these in the budget and let's see what plant moran comes back with as far as what you need we had heard preliminarily from plant moran that yeah you're going to at least need that at a minimum which you have here on the screen we did lose six of these fte's total you see nine this line in blue here that's our internal service funded positions and then down on the orange line there these are our positions that are general funded traffic operations those are the guys that actually do the signal repairs they're out putting signs and markings down we lost two there one with somebody who took a position somewhere else another for another reason the vsp hits really were in the internal service fund it was three of our inspectors and then we lost a couple of engineers and one of our real estate folks so those are areas that we're looking to refill but we absolutely do want to see what that plant moran recommendation comes back first and let that really be the basis for where we go next building off that this org chart is actually a little different today with the recent restructuring in july real estate is is not a part of our group although they still have that same fund code so they are lined up there today but as far as a reporting structure they're not within our reporting structure anymore we do have all these other groups still established within our reporting structure and it is it will i'm sure continue to change if we get more efficient at what we're doing as a preliminary outlook for the forecast for 2021 and five-year forecast you will see that between 2021 and the 1920 estimate there's about a million dollar difference the prime increase there was the hr green contract which is 100 cost recoverable so you'll see that yeah we may be spending that on the contract but that's also being funded by development as it comes in so that is anticipated as it comes in it also goes out then you have the other component of that which is the ids contract that's john pollster and his company that help focus our efforts when we go looking for external funding that provides that resource for us as we're looking for those partners to bring more money to the city's dollars stretch those dollars further on these capital projects he is that resource that helps bring those to our table to the doorstep so to speak so we can have that conversation and and then consider those agreements so that's where the prime increase in those two in that number that million dollar number really comes from is those two contracts and then from a traffic operations perspective we're not recommending any real substantial changes traffic operations from this fiscal year into next fiscal year so it stays pretty flat for that group and at this time i'll take any questions okay we'll move on then to the next presentation we're having a hard time hearing you mayor all right my mic was messed up so thank you so much any questions for capital projects all right thank you todd for that presentation and we'll move on to the next presentation thank you todd heilman for letting me know that we need to get part of stuff okay so we're about ready to go oh you're on mute you're on mute larry i was waiting for aaron to get back okay all right so you're ready for me to begin oh yeah whenever whenever you're ready yep i'm ready good morning mayor council larry colister at the city attorney's office we're here to present our 2021 budget to go briefly over our accomplishments from last year we we'd also accomplished several of our goals that we've set out for the prior budget year but we wanted to really go through in depth the details of a lot of things that went on last year one we were able to deal with and draft and negotiate all the legal documents for colon hunter ranch in house we provided significant legal assistance in updating and revising the new 2019 development code we drive to the first right away construction management ordinance tray worked with development services on rolling out a new three-way development agreement streamlining the time frame in which those get run through by moving things to docu side with the addition of michael kronig we were able to bring all the in-house legal work involving civil service meet and confer and display appeals regarding civil service in-house and in addition he's able to work on drafting all the new police general orders one item there i think is a particular note and created a uh dfw city listserv to react to the covet 19 pandemic and it's been used uh successfully with all the attorneys and the metroplex by being able to in real time address discussion on the uh more than numerous orders that came out from the governor's office and various hg opinions that everybody was able to just cooperate and probably get the best product out and also address issues that each city is dealing with service level changes uh this is this is an interesting time for legal we we were fully staffed going in to uh pre-covid then we ended up uh stephanie neal left to go to the city muskete she wanted to move down to the dallas area and so we were down an attorney rolling into covet and we had had everybody in the office everybody was attending everything in person and when covet hit we ended up rolling into a rotating once over four weeks having uh really a skeleton staff in the office however we did not miss a beat and i think along with i'd heard the city manager talk about departments that were really impacted by this we had two attorneys dedicated to the all the covet 19 activities and if you recall all the orders that had continually come out at the beginning of this through the governor's office that were coming out there were federal issues that were coming out we had the election issues come up open meetings issues cost reduction we had two attorneys that spent a significant amount of their time and it caused us to really reevaluate and restructure workload within the office during that time we also immediately could have stopped any type of wouldn't necessarily us but all the cle was done online at that point we have ongoing obligations to meet a certain number of hours and then the municipal court transitioned online which was interesting you and you've probably seen the numbers drop significantly um with that in addition with the covet 19 activities we also had one of the two attorneys that were involved in that catherine clifton that was also doing hr that was intimately involved with all the vsp as it was going on the 2021 emphasis for us is to develop and maintain a states that are highly capable response and cost-effective staff that we can work anywhere we're doing that through competitive salaries and increased use of tech which i think we've just about maximized during uh covet and then relevant and in topical training and our focus is cross training and hiring attorneys that have specific experience for um what we face at this city when i was brought in i'm board certified real estate law i was able to bring in all the real estate matters in house we cut a couple million dollars off the budget over a three-year period with outside council spend we're starting to see that with tray the same thing with the condemnation we're taking more of that in house with the addition of catherine clifton and cynthia kerkov both in hr and in planning we're able to do that as well and now with the addition of michael cronig we're doing all of the civil service and police and fire related activities in house and so just going forward one of the things we're trying to do now again is we don't know how long covet is going to last or or if it goes away if it comes back is to make sure that our staff has the ability to work um officially and effectively but at the same level whether they're sitting at home whether on the road whether they're in the office and we've been able to do that our goals for 2021 are fairly simple and it revolves around getting everybody staffed and hiring the right attorneys and then we want to continue the cross training that we've had going on again functioning both wherever we're at you know it's seamless that's what we're wanting to be able to do one of the things we are working with now with management is uh smart sheet has worked out we're really trying to refine that we have um recently had some meetings with as um positions have changed with with mario's departure we found opportunities to really figure out figure out ways that we can better use smart sheet and prioritization of requests that are coming in to better meet the needs of staff on that cost containment strategies this really revolves around us trying to do more in-house than outside um we we again we electronic we've got electronic files we can access whatever we need wherever we're at we've reevaluated our um staff duties we've really opened them up to more of a pool system instead of having anybody assigned and one of the things we have done is as looking at our outside council spinner management analyst rod cowl did a deep dive and i'll use a term i'm not familiar with my wife is and those management sought are setting up a pivot table in excel to uh build a really look at numbers and we've been able to go back through 2014 and and take a hard look at numbers that necessarily weren't really tracked in the past and we have cut down outside council spend by during the years 2014 2016 the city had spent 3.61 million in outside council 3.1 million of that was in utilities uh 27 through 2019 that went down to 1.5 million and the portion of that for utilities and engineering was 440,000 and so that that just goes to show that we you know we pulled all the real estate acquisition in which was related to a lot of the utility cost engineering cost and a lot of the regulatory matters and we have pulled in through just the ability to educate ourselves and to do things and using outside council when appropriate to drop those numbers down and as kind of a point of reference outside council hourly rates that we use right now range from $205 an hour to $605 an hour and the the higher end is going to be more on some of the issues related to the emo one of the other things that i find interesting on this is when you compare that it's our in-house hourly rates or 72 dollars an hour to 146 dollars an hour and that's an all-in that's benefits and everything so you can see the difference right there on the cost so again what we're looking at doing in 2021 is developing continuing to develop an in-house workforce you know we'll probably start doing more webinars online i think that's just going to be dictated by what's going on today our analysis of the outside council spend has really identified some areas that we can work with management of litigation prevention by training communication with city staff and i think i think we'll be able to knock that down further than we're monitoring our spending on supplies and producing over time these are some of the metrics that we've looked at these go quarter they they match up q1 through q3 for the last going to last three fiscal years and the workload is is staying consistent and increasing in certain areas and you all had received an email that resulted from a question from councilman melzer that i wanted to address here in that didn't present issues by virtue of its physical location by virtue of its society that you typically only see in large cities we don't have a peer city that matches us with the legal issues that we face we face things that it would be austin it would be san antonio it would be the border cities whatever people are facing nationally we face here and so one of the things we're trying to look at on our metrics now is we had three smart sheet entries on hunter coal well i think the council is aware of the work that went into that those three items are just a single item on this metric that doesn't accurately reflect the time and attention to detail that went into that again these are additional metrics on what we're looking at one of the things we one of the goals we did achieve last year was having all the attorneys assigned to boards commissions council committees to look at agendas and make themselves available as needed to show up to each of those meetings the organizational chart it's i can i can kind of walk through the vacant position stephanie neal's position which we're currently hiring then we have matters broken out through office administration and then risk management kind of hr civil service and risk management includes litigation and then utilities transactions kind of the general government services on the other side and and all the individuals are identified on that chart going to our budget highlights what we're looking at you can see the numbers here and again we're at we we have been talking with actually it's been the city manager tony puente and erin have discussed kind of the response times for our office that's one of the other things we're really trying to start measuring more closely but we definitely know when things are slowing down is because of the nature of the projects that we have coming through we still have day-to-day items that are driven by the agenda that have slowed down a little bit and i know between erin and tony and todd meeting they've discussed the addition of two additional attorneys to be able to make sure the responsiveness that our office is providing to management is met and exceeded so we've gone there were 14 attorneys by our actually nine attorneys back in 16 17 and we're wanting to go to 12 in 2021 and what we're looking at is is getting probably someone with heavy litigation experience in hr looking at another utilities attorney and then a probably a strong municipal generalist with what in those positions that we're looking to fill there's the supplemental package and i'm open for questions all right if we'll pull down the screen all right thank you any questions council member melzer really just come and thanks for the clear explanation larry and uh clearly when you seek coal and hunter ranch is just there's two items you know they're not the same as all other items council member breaks my my question is about um items that are in the legal department for for a while um you know uh i guess so the reason why we want to hire more staff is to make that more efficient and move things through quicker i'm just seeking clarification on that and i'm also wondering if we have any data or metrics on projects that go to legal and how long they they're they're there i don't want to stay stuck but how long they're there and if we do hire the appropriate staff if those metrics would show that those things are moving through quicker you know they would one of the things i think council needs to understand is up until the time erin took over his interim there's probably a period of at least 10 years that metrics weren't tracked and so we don't have a lot of historical data one to fall back on too we had to read we had to create that a whole cloth and that's where the smartsheet program came in and so we're looking at that and so we have some metrics on individual items that come in but again it's like council member melzer was talking with hunter coal that item comes in that thing went on for six months and so that's the turnaround time on it you have routine items coming in through purchasing that may be they're out in a week one of the things we have just started this week is meeting with operations with the new deputy city manager citizen city manager in their departments to talk about that and to get some kind of aspirational time frames that we're looking okay ordinances will be turned around in five days and five business days at the time they come in other items will come in it'll be out seven to ten working days you know provided we've got all the information we need and then being able to work with sarah and the city attorney's office to make sure they're getting their stuff timely and the agendas aren't going out at eight o'clock on a friday and so we're we're working with them now to do that what's important about it is for us to hire people that have the experience i mean you look at the individuals in the office now they have just significant deep deep experience in the areas they work in and that was not the case when i started that has been the case since then and so to answer your question i think yes we're going to see that result turn around and also you know one things we had to do was covid has presented challenges to everybody and so you know we went from an office that's in house to basically a virtual law firm and working with everybody so that that ended up impacting some turnaround times but i think everybody in the entire city the council should be you should you know it should be very proud of their staff the attorney's office and the auditor and what they've done during this thank you guys i'll mute council member davis you could read my lips thank you i didn't want to assume no no i'm sorry go ahead all right larry i've got a frank question for you and i want you to feel free to to give a frank answer we spent a quite a bit of time at our council retreat last year talking about the demands on staff time that come from council requests and council projects you know things that we think up and we ask the city to investigate and i know that legal is a portion of that is there a place on your slides or a metric you can give us or even just a a picture you can give us of how much of this additional attorney time is generated from you know the bright ideas that we give you and uh in council council meetings the projects we come up with or the questions that we ask that have significant legal involvement um in short how much extra work is the city council creating for the city attorney's office and does that correlate to the need for additional staff to handle projects as they come up i think you know looking about one we don't have a specific metric for that i know aaron meets weekly with the city manager when they go through the requests that have come in from council and are tried to that and oftentimes we're part of that we're not it's not a direct question for us now what you will see from us that'll be a direct response to council be typically through what comes out in legal status and that's not all time but those will come out in there does that impact the additional to hire somebody to be able to do that probably not is that additional work yeah sure it's work that has to be done and i think that that's that also i think probably speaking organizationally with the one minute pitch that that has changed that that has reduced i think everything because now council has created a protocol to address that and that has ended i think that took care of the issue itself okay if i'm if i'm reading between the lines correctly and i know aaron's got a response as well it sounds like you're saying there was at one time a significant uptick in the amount of time your office had to spend responding to council requests or council projects council directives but that the one minute pitch has uh that change in procedure has helped address that problem that is correct yeah yeah aaron we can't hear you you're on mute you're still on mute there you go that is correct it has dramatically brought down the legal research required for a lot of the issues keep in mind that a lot of the requests that we're receiving the overwhelming majority were directed to operations but a lot of those operational issues had a legal component that we had to research as well a lot of the topics that were brought forward where again as larry had mentioned earlier were issues that other cities our size are smaller don't even face and so that involved extra research time but you're correct it has dramatically dropped down the one minute pitch has dramatically decreased that we still do that research and the closest metric that we can that is on the list that was presented before you where those requests are captured are in the legal status report items okay all right questions any more questions for legal all right thank you larry it is 10 o'clock let's take a quick break five or ten minutes and we'll come back and continue our budget departmental budget presentations welcome everybody back to this meeting of the denton city council on august the 6th 2020 it is 10 16 we're resuming our work session report the only one we have for this special called work session which is 1a and its departmental budget presentations and then an overall budget presentation i do want to mention to my colleagues that when myself included obviously that when we go off camera it's as if we've left the room if we were in person so that before you do that if you could just make sure that there's enough council members still online to create it to to maintain a quorum because if it drops below four even though you may be listening and still there it's for the sake of a quorum if we're off camera then i think that it basically takes us out so i want to be really mindful of that just because it's a new process and procedure for us we probably assume that but i just i asked the city attorney that during the break and he confirmed that that's what we need to be mindful of so all right we'll resume our presentations departmental presentations good morning mayor and council frank pugsley water and wastewater utilities director let me go ahead and the presentation up on the screen with you this morning to discuss the operational portion of the water utilities department budget for this year i'd like to start with a little retrospective on some of the accomplishments from the past year as well as our future goals looking forward we have a couple important projects ongoing at the lake bluesville water treatment plant the phase two upgrades and zebra mussels improvements projects to help improve the resiliency and reliability of that plant as well as the solids handling upgrade for the the water treatment residuals in the future this next coming year a couple of important projects i want to just point out we are intending to procure a study to evaluate advanced metering infrastructure or ami which is essentially a smart metering for the the water distribution side similar to dme smart meters and we also intend to continue to use our newly implemented asset management program to really optimize our system replacement and that is assigning a score similar to the street condition index to all of our linear assets the pipes in the ground to make sure that we are syncing up with streets as well as replacing the right pipes at the right time so we're not uh you know pouring good money after good pipes that still have life left in the ground some of our philosophical changes from the past year over the last 12 to 18 months we've really worked diligently in the water and wastewater utility on uh you know improving our culture culture building as well as breaking down silos and we have really done a great job i think of integrating our processes and actual job functions with other departments in the organization all the way from tech services to capital projects and in the streets department and a couple of innovative and cost-saving items coming up for the ray roberts water treatment plant i think everyone has kind of heard us speak about the upcoming expansion of the plant over the last several months we've actually started developing a process or a program to upgrade the ray roberts plant using the existing infrastructure working with the tceq so we can get extra capacity out of the current plant and that way we're able to push back the the large capital expenditure for expansion a few more years while we await the 100 coal development and we can accommodate our anticipated growth with that at a reduced cost reviewing a little bit of operational data from water production we are having a you know fairly strong year from a water production standpoint we were on this graph the the gray area is our five-year average the green line is last year's water production blue is this fiscal year and the kind of brown line is our budget for this year we started off the year fairly close to our budget we've had a couple of wet months in march and april where we were nearer to fiscal year 19 and during the the hot dry months of may and june in july we've seen our demand steadily rise and we actually finished july basically in between last year and our budget so we're doing fairly well there as far as the water distribution department operational data we are breaking this into minor maintenance and major maintenance some highlights on the minor maintenance side we do intend to flush around 10 500 fire hydrants this year it's operating flush and our goal for next year is to move that up to 11 000 meter replacements is nearly 3200 and again next year's goal is around 3200 that number fluctuates off and on with the 13 year replacement cycle on our meters for major maintenance in-house historically we have targeted in the in the last several fiscal years about 16 000 feet of major maintenance infrastructure replacement one of the aspects of our asset management program that we uh implemented this past year is bumping that goal up this fiscal year and into the future to a minimum of 24 000 linear feet of replacement or major maintenance and that is to keep us on par with replacing our lines that are beyond their expected useful life and we need to be able to make sure that we have in-house crews to do a portion of that and we're going to use outsourcing to meet that goal or exceed it as we go forward one of the good things about outsourcing for us is we can turn that on and off in order to meet our goal but we really can't turn on and off emergencies so our core group of in-house field staff will still be available to to handle those emergencies that we see while we're still able to meet our 24 000 foot goal fte summary we started the year with 107.5 employees and water and through vsp and other vacancies we had 18 and a half vacant positions we were approved to refill 12 and a half of those and today we sit at 101.5 and are moving into the next fiscal year with that you'll see the estimated salary savings for next year is a little over 500 000 and the positions that we eliminated from the budget are listed in the bulleted list and we've accomplished this with really no reductions in service we're still able to repair our emergency main breaks we're still meeting our line replacement goals and our other service goals and keeping our uptime for water distribution similar and the same to what it has been in the past the organization chart for water utilities you're all familiar with our general manager of utilities ken banks and this shows his six direct reports and our various functional responsibilities one thing of note in the red box the clear creek natural heritage center is highlighted here and that's just to indicate that the the educational programming and the sustainable schools components of the clear creek center have been moved to the parks department and gary packin discussed that in a little bit more detail just wanted to to make everyone aware of that small change in our functional responsibilities and with that i will open it up to questions on the operational aspects before i hand it over to nick any questions on the operational side if we could pull the screen down so i could see the council members that'd be great thank you council member davis yeah so it's a budget question that has a back-end policy question that i don't expect an answer to today but my question is on you mentioned smart meters is a future goal is that something that you anticipate in the the coming budget year that we'll have information on or it's something that will will study this budget year and have an impact on a future fiscal year we intend to study it because there are a lot of options out there for us and we just want to make sure if we move in that direction we're choosing something that is best for the city from a fiscal and an operational standpoint and we need to see how we can combine our efforts with dme so if we need to have a combined platform that's a good option for us we're really working towards that so the actual implementation would be in future fiscal years okay and the the my budget question that relates to a policy question is i'd really like us to look very very carefully at that i'd i'd ask you to look into the experience jackson mississippi had the smart meters their contract with siemens it's an enormous boondog will cost them millions of dollars to climb out of that hole so if we could be kept up to date on that we don't want to micromanage but if we could be kept up to date on that um yeah so that we could i guess voice our our concerns throughout the process that way we don't have uh y'all making a big presentation to us and then council voicing concerns at the 11th hour absolutely yeah we'll definitely keep everyone in the loop all right thank you uh council member briggs thank you mayor yeah my question is about sustainability again because it's the clear creek heritage center is is boxed out and i guess that's moved over to park um how many fte's were there any in there accounted for that and are those transferring over to parks it's just really not clear and so i want to make sure that something that it's not lost mayor city council nick vinson assistant director of finance those positions are actually those fte's are accounted for in the water fund and they're actually being paid for out of water but they'll actually be reporting to parks or gary packen setting into your question they are not being lost they are accounted for in the water utility okay and so um will that that will remain next year and then i guess be reevaluated or that's correct our intent is is to remain it or keep them in the water utility for 2021 reevaluated and possibly move them over in 2022 but currently for the 2021 budget year we will leave them in the water utility budget okay and how many is that three three positions okay thank you okay anyone else all right and we'll move on to think to the financial uh presentation for the water department that is correct all right so as i previously said this is an abbreviated conversation for the financials for the water utility we do come plan to come back to the city council in december this year with a detailed discussion for each of the utilities regarding the rates in the budget once we have a full understanding of the covid pandemic and what it has in the utilities so real quick some of the revenue assumptions that we have built into the budget we currently do have a two percent growth forecast in the out years we are continuing to utilize impact fee funding to revenue fund projects and this was something that we started last fiscal year and we are continuing into the future and i will show you that on the five-year forecast shortly each of the utilities are accounting for the hunter coal ranch development as previously pointed out in the electric utility presentation about a week ago and that does come on in 2023 and expenses we are forecasting three percent growth in the future years and there's the hunter coal ranch note again and then we are currently proposing a two percent rate decrease for water customers this fiscal year this doesn't amount to about a one dollar and eight cent decrease for residential customers and i'll review that with you shortly and this is the 10-year forecast for the water fund in an effort to increase transparency we have started showing this forecast in the 10-year outlook so a couple things i want to point out for you can see the adopted 2020 budget here in this column we did have an adopted budget this fiscal year using about 2.9 million in reserves we are forecasting as frank has said for water production to be a little bit better this year production to be up so we're forecasting to come in a little bit better than originally budgeted about 2.8 million in reserve usage we do currently have a covid impact feed number of a 617 000 anticipated to impact the water fund as i've said as we get a better understanding of this through our high usage months through july through september we will come back to the city council in december and update you on this number moving forward you can see the proposed 2021 budget column here we have planned use of reserve 3.9 million for total expenses of 52.9 in this green line you can see the two percent rate decrease that we are proposing for the water utility moving down the page a little bit you can see the operating reserve we currently have 17.8 million we do keep a separate impact be reserve that you can see of nine million dollars right here on this line reserve targets so we do have a minimum and maximum reserve target for the water utility the minimum being 17.5 and the maximum being 26.5 so as you can see this reserve does stay in that reserve target each of the years slightly dropping below in 2030 in that 10th year you can see it's just a few thousand dollars below the minimum requirement a couple of things i'll point out on this pro forma i mentioned earlier the impact fee revenue funding of projects so this is impact fee revenue we are using to revenue fund projects up front instead of issue debt for those projects and this is in a continued effort to decrease the debt service in this fund so this has been working out really well for the water utility this is the five-year cip forecast for the water fund you can see we've broken it down and summarized it by different issuance types so you can see debt issuance of 35.5 million revenue funding this is funded through operating the operating funds those rate revenue of 12.9 impact fee funding which i reviewed with you is 2.7 million we have a little bit of 80 construction and then some vehicle replacement about 275,000 so a total 2021 cip of 51.7 million we wanted to show you a few of the major projects currently going on and what they look like over the next 12 to 36 months as they get started and get completed and so at the top you can see elm and locust is one of the projects we currently have a budget for of 950,000 we are currently estimating the completion day of this project of january 31st 2020 which is already passed but i wanted to point this out to everybody and then at the bottom you can see the fy 2020 street bundling and design we have a project listed down there in 2023 has been completed so this is really meant to show the major projects in the water fund what the budget is how much money is currently allocated to it and how much is remaining this is one of the things that the finance department does each year and works closely with frank and his staff to determine how much funding is needed for these projects so the cip that you slide that you previously saw we make that determination throughout the year of how much of that money we actually need to issue for the water utility this slide shows the current rates and the proposed rates so it's grouped into three different sections here we're just proposing these minimal changes to the rate ordinance will which will come back to you in september for consideration and approval the top is the residential rate we do use a three-quarter inch meter for residential customers currently the rate is 16 with that two percent rate decrease it takes that rate to 1568 and this is the first tier zero to 15,000 gallons our current rate is four dollars and 15 cents but the rate decrease that rate would go to 407 and commercial we show a two inch meter so a little bit bigger meter for the facility charge is 5150 but the two percent rate decrease they go to 5047 and then the volume charge they are charged per thousand gallons and there's not actually a tiered structure on the commercial side so the current rate is 445 with the rate decrease they go to 436 and there are a couple of contractual rates that we are looking to update as part of the agreements with these customers the first one being the wholesale raw water service with the opportunity regional water district and this rate is set at 85 percent of the dallas wholesale rate so currently this rate is 0.7401 and moving forward we are looking to change that to 0.7578 and the second one being the pass through the lake chapman and currently the rate is 0.0270 you can see that right here and this rate is set at the cpi adjuster for the month of june and so this rated will adjust to 0.0275 this summarizes the rate adjustments for the utilities and you had seen electric previously we are not forecasting rate changes for the electric utility water we just reviewed this one it does work out to be about a dollar and eight cents per year for residential customer wastewater we're not proposing any rate changes for wastewater this fiscal year and then solid waste you'll see a little bit later in today's presentations we are proposing a dollar rate decrease for customers for residential customers as their debt service continues to decline in the future years and i'll point that out to you here shortly what are the note if you do remember city council last november december did approve a mid year rate decrease for solid waste customers of three dollars previously this rate was 24.51 it did it did decrease to 21.51 after that three dollar decrease kind of the calendar moving forward the next step so this presentation was originally scheduled to be presented this last tuesday it did get rescheduled till today the sixth so we didn't get that updated there that should be the sixth a pv this presentation has gone to the public utility board it will return to them a little bit after august 10th we will be taking a detailed budget discussion to them and review the red line rate ordinance for them and then september 15th the city council is scheduled to adopt the budget tax rate and capital improvement plan and as i've mentioned this is an abbreviated conversation or financial picture of the water fund we will come back with a cost of service rate design study in december in a budget discussion with you with that i will open it up for questions for water okay any questions council member breaks is there a section or an area on the performer where it indicates the amount of water lost or the cost of that water that was lost on the city side through through leaks is that it's not it's not called out council member bricks and it would be considered part of their o and m budget and i can point that out to you on the pro forma if you'd like that it would be buried in that o and m expense number would you like me to point that out for you well i see o and m okay yeah i do i do see that so it's just buried in there it is and and we could get with frank if you'd like some detailed numbers to to go along with that we can bring that back to your follow-up with you the memo okay thank you we tend from a budgetary perspective to monitor that each year through the we do these line tracing we and look for actual leaks but typically your utilities that are managing that well are going to be somewhere in the five to seven percent five to eight percent water line loss there's never there's never going to be a time where you're at zero because your your infrastructure is always changing and moving and shifting and um so it is important that we that we go out and contract that for you but right now i would say that we're probably still in the in the top five percent of all utilities in the country in terms of that statistic and and frank's shaking his head so it's something that we're constantly on but it's going to be built in that that loss will be built naturally into the rates each year but monitoring that that estimated line water loss number and how that is correlating with our main replacements and upgrade is is really the key to answering your question all right mayor pro tem thank you nick question on the residential water rate i was talking to a resident and pointed out the uh the uptick in the rate if you have more acreage or more land is that can can you speak to that that is that accurate in that distance how do you however i guess it would be the tier system you touched on yeah it'd be the tier system so for water residential customers we do have a tiered system currently in place it's being looked at by the consultants so the tier i showed you was zero to 15 000 that is the lowest tier that we have in the city as you step up to maybe say over 50 000 gallon um the rate does increase i mean the reason the rates are set like that is to incentivize water conservation in the water utility and to discourage over watering of yards and such in the community um so yes you're absolutely correct if you have a larger yard you use you know a larger amount of water you could possibly pay more than that rate i showed you yeah so but let me so just to make sure i understand it the the tiered system is based not on land mass per se it's on usage yes sir it is okay got it that that helps clear up the conversation thank you okay anyone else all right thank you nick let's move on i believe it's uh is it drainage or um it's wastewater i'll tell you water rain can walk you through wastewater and then daney kramer will come up walk you through drainage okay logan mayor and council frank mugsley water and wastewater utilities director here this time to discuss the wastewater utilities operational components and get the slide to advance there we go uh again start with uh kind of a short review of accomplishments and uh look forward to some future goals this last year we did complete the requirements of our epa administrative order uh that mandated we reduce our sanitary sewer overflows and we've done a very good job at that with our extensive uh flushing and cleaning programs that we have with our flushing truck uh crews and we are also getting very close to completing the replacement of the hickory creek lift station that you've heard about off and on over the last two years we're actually in a very good operational position with the old station today but by the end of this calendar year we should be fully online with our with our new lift station and not really have any headaches down there again for quite a long time our future goals are number one to complete the design of our phase one about the expansion of the pecan creek wastewater treatment plant we're going to step into the expansion in two or three phases that we can achieve to demonstrate to the tceq that we're meeting the requirements of our permit and we are also going to update our wastewater master plan so that we have a good road map of where our wastewater collection system needs to go in the future to support development and growth in the city as far as philosophical changes go i'm going to repeat a few things from from water because we're you know we're working together very closely these days but we've really worked hard to improve the culture and morale in the departments uh integrating with other groups and really over the last 12 to 18 months we've done uh more than i think we have in the recent past with less staff and in spite of the covid pandemic we're being very successful in our in our operation the cost saving piece i mentioned the expansion to pecan creek we are going to also conduct an expansion at the wastewater plant with existing infrastructure where we can get uh an additional about five million gallons per day of capacity without having to actually build any new volume at the plant and again our asset management program mirrors the water side where we are targeting the right pipes at the right time and also synchronizing that with the street replacement so that we can make sure we are impacting the residents in the street system as small impact as possible operational data for the wastewater collections group minor maintenance including inspection and cleaning this year we will hit a projected goal of 120 000 feet of inspection and that's our camera rig and the robot that looks at the insides of the pipes and the cleaning portion that i mentioned briefly in response to the epa administrative order we will have cleaned 675 000 linear feet of wastewater main in this fiscal year and project to do the same next year again we have set a new minimum in-house goal for our major maintenance of replacing a minimum of 24 000 linear feet of wastewater collection system every year again we you know we can't turn our emergencies on and off so our in-house staff need to be able to respond to emergencies as well as contribute to that number and we're going to use outsourcing so that we can meet that you can see this past fiscal year we've greatly exceeded the 24 000 feet and intend to increase that slightly in the past and historically you can see in the previous fiscal years we really haven't outsourced much of our system replacement so this is kind of a new paradigm for us it's worked out very well this year and we intend to continue it into the future until we can really catch up in replacing the infrastructure that is at or beyond its expected useful life the fte summary we began this fiscal year with 125 we had 31 vacant positions through vacancies departures and the vsp we have refilled or are approved to refill 12 of those leaving us with 112 ftes at this present time and going into next fiscal year you'll see the list of the positions we eliminated there in the slide and again we've done this with really no reductions in the level of service that are perceptible to the residents we're still meeting our maintenance goals from a minor and major maintenance standpoint as well as maintaining adequate treatment capacity and keeping everything running without regulatory impact the same org chart from the water utilities presentation again general manager ken banks and his direct reports with all of our functional areas and again the clear creek natural heritage center i'll repeat this in case anyone new is listening the educational programming components that are part of clear creek have been moved to the parks department so parks is going to be managing that piece of it including the educational topics and the sustainable schools and gary packin did discuss that a little bit in his presentation and with that i'll open it up for operational questions after i any uh operational questions council member melzer uh yeah similar to uh with water a couple of years ago there was uh then an envisioned 100 million dollar project 10 years out you've increased capacity at the concrete i think you said by five million gallons of capacity but what what does that do to the timeline for for the big capital requirement down the road so our current plan would be to increase the capacity of concrete by the 5 mgd through the uh the implementation of a new treatment process and because of the resurgence of the 100 coal ranch developments we did produce that water and wastewater master plan for hunter and coal and it actually recommends a new wastewater treatment plant on the west side of town to handle those flows because we can't physically get the wastewater from those developments all the way to pecan creek so we will be investing in a a new plant on the west side of denton at some point in the future and that's you know beyond 10 years from now when we will actually need that plan but i'm not sure i totally understand that because that plan will handle additional capacity that was or wasn't anticipated like when with the 100 million dollar concept you know was that assuming population that ends up being represented by coal hunter was coal hunter like a different uh component let me i mean because that these are these are sort of pseudo i mean policy questions about master plans and future plans so i mean if if you're asking where in the budget this year are we accounting for this potential uh larger expenditure then but i mean well is it still is it still needed and that question that i would need to understand before asking for how are we accruing for that or are we accruing for that so we are like i mentioned we are going to expand the pecan creek plant and that project will come in ideally uh under under 20 million dollars for the pecan creek expansion and then the future project is in the budget but it's beyond the five to ten year pro forma the 100 million dollar project yeah what you're mentioning yeah so we've deferred all of that far enough out that it doesn't show up in our pro forma okay does that answer your question i'm sorry yeah sort of okay it's not what we can see um and and therefore there's not kind of an accrual toward it but but i understand that we're pushing it further out by added capacity uh if i can uh ask you the question mayor sure uh you know it's it's very impressive to not have to backfill all those vacancies and still keep the same performance you know as far as customer facing performance um but are we have we lost any capacities in terms of planning or things that maybe wouldn't be customer facing that might have a you know might present a challenge for us at some point sure i don't i don't believe we've lost any capabilities in that standpoint what we have done there's some select reorganizations within the department to move some of our functional groups under different supervision so that they can you know be freed up to do more things as well as we're sharing some labor even with the solid waste department at the uh at the beneficial reuse complex because we've lost some positions there so we're working together to do more and the same amount if not more than we have in the past well it's great to take you know really you know unpleasant uh you know set of challenges and find efficiencies out of it thanks council member riggs my question was about the beneficial reuse um i did see that the the customer service representative was on the eliminated positions um i my question was was one of the approved refills for that position or is that completely eliminated and then you said you were sharing some capacity with the beneficial reuse so um that is the customer service facing part of of an organization i think um that's pretty important and if we haven't reduced levels of service i just want to make sure that um that's being covered as far as the the budget goes so absolutely that's one of the things that we are sharing uh in labor with solid waste department they had some uh part-time employees who had availability and our customer service representative beneficial reuse did exit the organization through the vsp so in light of that we partnered with solid waste and also are using some of our uh wastewater reclamation staff to cover the operation of the the sales office at beneficial reuse yes go ahead yeah so i i'm just is that the plan going forward or are those positions that have been approved included in in that list of 18 no so those you know the solid waste positions are in solid waste and this is our plan for the time being and we uh always will be evaluating the effectiveness of that if things change then we do have the ability to uh return to you know the city manager's office and and request another position if it's deemed necessary but right now we are managing quite well with the uh setup that we've got okay all right any other questions okay thank you and i guess we move on to these at the uh financial portion drainage drainage morning mayor good morning let me pull this up real quick wrong one okay we'll get it figured out sooner or later my name is andrew kramer deputy director of operations for public works and i'll be talking about the uh drainage uh budget so over the past year uh we've actually done quite a few uh projects that we were able to complete we had our smith and johnson and mckinney street and also our long ridge we had some emergency repairs over there uh we were able to complete our goal of inspecting of the 25 of our drainage inputs as we said last year at our budget presentation some of our future goals that we're going to be looking at uh one of the major ones that we're going to try to accomplish or at least get the uh get the contracts out and get going is the inspecting grade our existing storm drain systems that we have currently with some of the issues that have popped up over the past past year or so with some of these uh failures that we've seen we want to be able to go through and actually rate our our current system that we have um kind of like we do with the street oci so we can plan some of our our replacements and be able to be more proactive on that and um you know as we continue we're going to be focusing our department towards you know maintaining our current storm drain inventory and we are also working with our engineering department to reevaluate our capital program going forward to make sure that we take a full holistic look at everything in the city as it relates to drainage some of our service level changes pre-covid and post-covid as we said last year we're gonna 100 inspection of our concrete channels and 100 inspection of our earth and channels and with 25 percent percent inspection of our inlets and you know post-covid we're going to continue our inspection of our concrete channels we do hit those every year and verify everything is flowing good our earth and channels are going to drop we will inspect all of our major earth and channels as we as we always have and we will continue to do the ones as an as needed basis as they come up or we get complaints or issues that we see out in the field and our our inlet inspection is going to drop with the internal crews for roughly 10 percent some of the operational data so currently we mow 155 acres in the drainage channels and that's we roughly try to hit four cycles per year which is about 620 acres we are currently at 311 and see us meeting our goal of 620 by the end of the year with no problem our street sweepers we sweep 770 lane miles per cycle we try to hit about 10 cycles per year which is roughly 7800 miles and that in the 7800 actually includes our thoroughfares which we do every friday on that one of our currently we have 5400 we look to hit around 7000 lane miles this year mainly because one of our street sweeper operators did take the vsp we are in currently looking for a replacement for that and we're working on hiring that position concrete channel inspection like i said there's 86 000 almost 87 000 linear feet and currently we did do a full inspection of those right around this fall and we are working on doing our our maintenance of those channels now and we will continue to keep that up uh through our fte summary uh drainage really started out with 20 fte's um at the 1920 budget we had uh seven vacant uh refills and seven vacant uh fte's and we got two approved refills uh for a total of 15 going forward and i'll talk a little bit more about that on our organizational chart uh roughly what we eliminated from the drainage department was the inspection crew that we did ask for last year and a an actual drainage manager which we had both our drainage manager and our supervisor apply for the vsp and a and one of our htl1 which was running our street sweeper we decided to replace the street sweeper operator and also just the supervisor we are going to continue to evaluate over the next year on how we want to um go forward with the drainage department we are working with engineering on the overall drainage plan for the city and making sure that all of our cip projects are are in um excuse me are in congruent with all their projects that are going on and with the new restructuring that we've had over with um the public works department we are looking at sharing some work in between different different groups as we go through and so we'll be looking at some different things with parks and everybody else that we can work together and that concludes our operations presentation are there any questions questions i have one you said that um you we we had a drainage inspection crew that we approved last year and we eliminated it this year is that it was that my understanding yes sir we actually had um one crew leader approved and three fte's um at the start of it we had filled a crew leader position and one of the fte's and they were working um we had filled those i guess somewhere around november december time frame and we were working on filling the rest of the positions with the vsp we transferred some of those around and just pretty much eliminated that whole crew and are looking at um different ways to move forward and reevaluating our our nft status okay because i know that i think the the crews were approved so that we could have a little bit more timely um progression on the capital projects and so is the elimination of that not going to impact that because i i remember specifically that part of the concern uh before we approved that that new crew was that we weren't able to get the inspections done as quick as we could with i guess it was third-party inspectors or something and so we felt that this would help us move projects along faster now with the elimination of that does that put us back in the same position not not totally so what we've been looking at over the past year is how we've been using our crews and the most efficient way to use them a lot of our one of the options that we did work on with that crew was their first was maintenance and inspections going forward and also um to help free up a little bit of time for some of our for our construction crew to work on the construction projects that we did have the more and more we started digging into the construction projects the more that we saw that we weren't looking holistically at the city with all the drainage components and everything with all the big capital cip projects so as we're going through we're going to sit back and work with engineering going forward and make sure everything that all the small projects that we're doing is tied in to the whole storm drain system of working properly and as i also mentioned with some restructuring that we had in the public works department overall we do have some more opportunities to share some services back and forth which should be able to help us with the inspections and get back on so if i can conclude from your statements that you do not anticipate having the same issue that that warranted or that seemed to warrant the the additional crew that we're not going to have a uh a slowing down of projects based upon the ability to get them inspected on a timely manner you don't anticipate that happening okay okay good great all right any other questions all right thank you daniel appreciate it thank you and the next presentation is i guess the financial component of something yes sir mayor that is correct all right pull it up here and we'll go through is this for wastewater okay this is wastewater it's water and drainage both okay all right so this is a combined um yes okay that is that is correct yeah yep okay all right so really quick uh the financial assumptions this is um consistent with the water utility we have kept the revenue growth projections the same for water in wastewater so you can see the two percent listed under the revenue growth perceptions in the out years same thing in water as in wastewater we are continuing to utilize impact fee revenue funding to revenue fund as much eligible projects as possible um hunter coal ranch is accounted for in the wastewater pro forma and in drainage i will show you that here shortly and then we're currently not forecasting or proposing any rate changes for the wastewater utility this is the 10-year forecast for wastewater this does include drainage i will show you drainage separately on a separate pro forma here shortly but starting here in this column you can see the adopted 2020 budgets this is the current fiscal year that we're in we currently do have planned use of reserves of 1.6 million for a balanced budget and you can see zero percent rate increases included in the current adopted budget i do want to point out we did have the five percent rate decrease for wastewater customers in 2019 and that's shown on this pro forma the end of your estimate for 2020 and you can see we have have a little bit of revenue impact from the covid pandemic for the wastewater utility we will continue to keep the pub and city council updated about this when we come back in december so we are currently showing reserve usage about 1.9 million with no rate changes the proposed budget for 2021 we do have a balanced budget we're actually finished in the year about 292 000 positive with no reserve usage planned no rate changes i had previously mentioned and the ending fund balance you can see is 13.4 million in this fund similar to water we do have a minimum and a maximum reserve requirement the minimum being 10.3 and the maximum being 14.3 so this 13.4 does fall within that range i mean it does continue as you see as you go out into the future years through 2025 we are within the reserve requirement for the five-year picture and you get a little bit further out it does drop a little bit below but for the five-year picture we are within the reserve requirement in this fund the five-year cip for wastewater same thing as as in water we have separated by debt revenue impact funding so you can see debt is 32.8 million of bond issue it's currently planned revenue funding is 5.3 impact fee funding so revenue funding of projects of 500 000 and then some vehicle replacement of 1.2 so total five-year cip of 19.7 with 40 million of that being in 2021 the same thing here these are the major projects in the wastewater and drainage utility currently these are the funds that are currently allocated or the budget that's been identified for these projects and you can see the expenses to date the amount and currently encumbered or open on po's waiting to be paid out as the job get completed and then the remaining funding and you can also see the completion date so as i'd mentioned on water we do go through the wastewater utility we scrutinize these projects make sure how much money is available that can be shifted to other projects that are needing funding before we do any bond issuance in the wastewater utility this is the drainage five-year forecast so this is included in the wastewater pro forma that i previously showed you the 10-year forecast the proposed budget is here in this column 2021 so you can see we do have 5.5 million in total resources for the drainage component of wastewater the majority of the revenue to drainage there's some residential drainage fees and non-residential which be commercial so you can see 3.1 million for non-residential expenses 5.5 million for a balanced budget what we do show we've showed this every single year to city council is a 1 million dollar reserve for the drainage utility this is rolled up into the wastewater fund so the previously mentioned the rate slide i went over this with you in water i won't go completely through it again but you can see overall residential customers that have city didn't utility service can expect a two dollar and eight cents decrease this fiscal year if approved by city council next steps one of these with you in the water utility you can see the next thing coming up we will go back to the pub with the water wastewater electric and solid waste utilities to have a detailed budget discussion with them and rate discussion we will then circle back to the city council for adoption on september 15th and that concludes the wastewater financials council member breaks yeah on the on the drainage there was a section that said the channels were mowed and that was 620 acres and we heard earlier mr packing from park say that a lot of the mowing contracts were moving under parks is this staying in drainage and is this a separate contract or is this shown in our fgs as as in-house or is it is it getting moved also so that it's all under under parks daniel kramer's been working with gary on that so i'll ask him to come back up to address that question really quick council member briggs currently those are done in-house and what we use that for is those are the main channels that is part of our inspection of those main channels so that is a kind of we use it to take care of two things at once so as we're out there we're mowing we're verifying that there's um we're getting no erosion the channels are in good shape and everything as it goes forward we are gonna we have talked with uh parks and they they have taken over quite a few of our our other areas that we used to mow uh the high visibilities and stuff and we're still going to look at our uh take another look at what we currently do mow and see if there's certain areas that would make more sense for the contracts to mow versus what we do as we do our inspections while we're out there mowing okay okay thank you anybody else all right thank you we'll move on to our next presentation next one is solid waste mayor i'll ask brian to come up and present the operational information okay good morning mayor members of council my name is brian burner i'm the solid waste director for the city of denton and i come before you today to present what could arguably be the most highly anticipated presentation of the morning not because we're without question or concern because but because it's the final departmental presentation of the day i i appreciate your your wherewithal to give you all these arduous presentations and and you should be commended for the work that you're doing here and thank you very much for for your attention and your questions as we go through this this last year has been fairly monumental for our solid waste department we've had a good group of accomplishments some very important things that have that have occurred here in the city of denton you may remember that this year we've implemented our valet trash and recycling program in the downtown area to much acclaim and high success we've gone to a couple of conferences already presented on this and we're getting lots and lots of questions about how we do this and how the feedback is on this so thank you for helping us support this program as it's been coming into play secondly our yard waste program that one has been tremendous in the response before the the yard waste program we had about 10 12 of our residents actually putting material out on the curb with the implementation of our carted and bag program now we have 22 active subscriber or 22 of the of our population actively subscribing to the program picking up approximately 7,700 residents a week with the yard waste program what i think is so special about this and and really the the cherry on the top of this whole program is as a result of going to this automated system in this year we have not had any worker compensation claims due due to injuries in the collection staff due to yard waste program so again thank you very much for supporting this program as we move through our vehicle uptime is is tremendous right now so we're not losing days and effectiveness because we don't have the equipment to perform and then throughout this pandemic we have continued to retain the high quality of service that we were performing beforehand so again our folks are out there day in and day out continuing to provide these services i want to thank them personally in this this public forum for meeting the need of our citizens in that area as we move forward we're gonna we're not going to risk on our laurels here here in the next few weeks you will see a contract for our comprehensive solid waste management strategy we have a contractor identified we're currently working through the contracting process and as a result hopefully within the next few weeks we'll kick that off start talking with the public and start actually putting together strategy which will help us in planning what our solid waste program will look like over the next 10 to 20 years we're also very close to working on replacing our scale house asset management routing software solutions you'll start seeing some of those contracts coming forward also in the very in the next few weeks it'll improve accuracy and help modernize our operation again we continue to refine programs and enhance safety and services through the delivery of these programs in to our citizens and our businesses again we have a philosophy of delivering exceptional services i mean looking for sustainability financially and operationally trying to focus on what the citizens need and as well as our businesses in meeting the needs of the community from surface level change i i brought to this uh talked about this just a minute ago throughout this entire covid we have not downsized nor have we curtailed any services that we have been delivering to the citizens of denton this is unlike many communities within the state as well across the nation and fortunately due to our dedicated staff we've been able to go out and meet the needs of the community we have changed some areas of operation that that involve a public facing aspect so you know when covid hit we closed down the actual drop-off and a portion of our home collection home chemical collection facility and the reuse store however curbside collections continue and amounts that we've collected curbside have continued to increase so again still trying to meet those needs we're not accepting cash or scale house only credit or debit cards to minimize the potential contamination between customers and our staff in in the in the in the in the in the house we've implemented a modified task system for our drivers so once they're done with their routes they go home but again they're backing each other up so if a driver a ends his route early he goes and tries to help driver b finish his route and then once they're done they get to go home as opposed to waiting around and doing other things potentially creating an exposure issue and then finally here our scale house staff is is providing assistance to beneficial reuse with the download dirt customer sales so we're using our excess capacity with our service provide or our customer service agents they are able to staff down our dirt customer service area and continue that operations and benefit both operations from an operational standpoint again denton as part of the north texas area is one of the fastest growing communities in north texas and arguably the nation we anticipate that in 2021 again we'll have over a thousand new residents that we will be providing service to and again we've got to maintain an opportunity to continue providing those services yard waste with the with the the implementation implementation new program we still continue to collect as much if not more material than than we've had most notably even in light of cobit here we continue to have increases in commercial containers that are hauled so what we did see an impact to slight impact to our business community as a result of of of cobit construction as well as as move-ins move-outs things of that nature continue to increase and and roll-off service continues to to be needed here in the city of dampen similarly wholesale volumes have have jumped this past year due to our contracts that we've had which you'll notice in 2023 after those contracts fall away the wholesale volumes are almost completely eliminated retail volumes however continue to rise and we can anticipate them rising even more and when we talk about retail volumes this is these are the people that come across the gate across the scales and pay the gate rate with the closure of dfw landfill in lewisville we anticipate that just residents and and people that are self-hauling material have to have a place to put this material and they will be driving into denton to to dispose of this material so we anticipate increases in just the retail volumes that are coming in day in day out one thing i would like to to focus on is our landfill compaction density you'll notice that continues to improve and a lot of that has to do with right sizing the equipment that we have at the landfill in the past year past few years we've been able to increase this incrementally we anticipate that as a result of this increase in compaction and when i talk about compact it's putting more waste into it into a volume of of space in the landfill the increased volumes that we've actually seen as a result of our contracted waste that's coming in has had a basically a net zero impact on the landfill so we've been able to put this amount of waste into what would have normally been the average growth of the landfill so again we're still on track with the life of the landfill as we had previously anticipated from an fte standpoint when we talk about solid waste and this is not the additional outside personnel that we do fund through the fund but those persons that are actually delivering services directly to the the residents 126 in this year throughout the year we had 14 vacant with approved refills of 11 so we're proposing to reduce our fte count in 2021 by three individuals that being a solid waste analyst our household hazardous waste supervisor which is currently handled that that duty is currently handled by another manager and we have a vacant solid waste assistant collections manager that with that we've had open this year so we're going to be giving that up for approximately four hundred thousand dollar in salary savings to be achieved in this year organization chart again we're divided into four functional groups here with the largest being our collections and landfill where most of our fte's reside from a supplemental package standpoint in this year's budget with the growth of our roll off services that are anticipated and we're currently undergoing we are going to be asking for increased purchase of or additional purchases of trucks again we've got personal protective equipment due to the growth in in the residential we're going to be requesting additional funding for cart purchases not just recycling and trash but also the success of our yard waste cart yard waste program results in the purchase of additional carts in the year and again commercial containers as we continue to grow throughout the year so with that i will take some questions that you may have regarding the solid waste budget council member melzer yeah uh but if you said it uh i i apologize i i may just have missed it but does the budget assume expansion of the successful valet program to other areas like the fire street area uh it is current when we talk about the the valet program it is already included it already includes the frost street area so it's not only the downtown area but is the frost street bars are there other areas that are anticipated and covered in the budget no currently we think that the the valet program has reached basically its maximum extent and again this is all related to shared service dumpsters and the equity that was involved in there throughout the city we've got one c2z shared dumpsters but those are basically in small strip centers and we can we can manage that from an equitable standpoint one thing we are using that the vat the additional effort that we currently have as a result of covid in the valet is there they're actually out doing some illegal dumping cleanup and servicing some of the illegal dumping that we see at the north lakes recycling centers many policy questions i'll save for that for that kind of discussion great uh let's see councilmember briggs and mayor pro tem uh yeah so i i'll hold the detailed budget questions for the financial part of it but on the future goals it says continue efforts to recycle right and reduce recycling contamination yes who who is doing that education and um is that is that in our in our fte's or is that in a different department now that has been over the past past few years uh outreach function through the sustainability group they've been doing a lot of that outreach but we also work with our public outreach office uh so uh we don't have any embedded education personnel in solid waste proper but through sustainability and public information uh we manage it through there okay all right thank you thank you mayor pro tem yeah thank you uh so i have a question where you left off on the for example the north lakes recycling center i would be curious to see if there's a if there's an additional cost to swap those containers over the weekend because i think that's the biggest problem so if you had re if you had recycle there during the week and then weekend there's just one large dumpster that it's swapped out i don't know what that cost would be but then just it's basically all in uh because i think that i don't know what that cost looks like to swap it out versus having to go back and parse through it after people illegally dumped there over the weekend uh primarily but i'd like to see what those numbers look like we have a presentation planned for next tuesday uh regarding the our residential recycling center and and the cost to to operate those that equipment okay and then is there a method by which we can force or strongly encourage a business to buy a larger container i see a lot overflowing and and just is there a way that we can control that from a from a purchase component then say you were if you if it's overfilled this many days we're going to start to charge you more pick up more is there a way to do that there there is a way we have to work through our municipal court system right now we're currently working on updates to our chapter 24 ordinances which will hopefully streamline that but there still is a a uh a court's hand in that and we are currently working through some of those issues right now and could that be realized this year as far as additional income to this year to to facilitate that not not this year but we are well down the road and hopefully early in in next fiscal year you will see the updates to the ordinance and we can work towards full implementation okay and then one last note for uh the city manager i didn't get this note into you in time but on this presentation or and and future presentation that that kind of goes over it i'd like to see a slide to capture what you said regarding the put a pay agreements and how that kind of sustained us during the covid uh period and so i'd like to see that kind of broken out i again didn't have time to get it in for this one but i want to see those numbers kind of and kind of so that i can do that analysis that you've already done um and uh i think important in that also if you could note is are the initiatives where we we were trying to recover losses so there's there's sugary drinks there's taking down the fountain that tank thing in the back and recouping that land so i want to kind of have a visual to say here's all the actions we took here's what the deficits that triggered here's how we were we're working through those and that's how it's how it affects the budget this year so i'll ask tony and brian to put that together all right thank you all right uh councilman barmiter uh yeah so i have some uh budget questions about dino dirt if have we seen any uh change in the in in sales of dino dirt uh demand for it uh and in addition to that uh are there any uh more affordable um alternatives that you know more just more sustainable and or affordable alternatives that have come up just if you wanted to to speak to those budgetary aspects of dino dirt from a budget standpoint again uh the the the beneficial reuse program in dino dirt is actually falls under water and wastewater but anecdotally we know that the traffic coming in and out of the of the facility is as strong as it was even before covid so again people are out there and in this time of of quarantining corn cleaning fixing up the house needing something to do uh that we are seeing people out and getting this material and actually upgrading their homes so uh you know it is a highly successful successful program and and i'm sure that it will continue to keep on with the amount of material that we're bringing up okay all right um anybody any other questions for the operational side all right then we'll move on to the financial side and i believe this is the last segment of the departmental budget presentations is that right yes okay thank you good afternoon mayor or good morning mayor city council members this thing is afternoon already i'll walk you through the financial slides of solid waste all right so uh similar to water and wastewater we do have a two percent growth forecasted for revenue in the future years um we do have a mayor pro tem asked a question about the wholesale agreements or the putter pay agreements shortly ago um i'll show that to you in the five-year forecast where those actually are anticipated to go away um if not reapproved by council at that point on expenses we are showing a two percent growth and forecasted expenses in the out years we have moved the cell construction based on the volume coming to landfill from 22 to 21 and i'll point that out to you shortly we are currently proposing a five percent residential rate decrease this equates to a one dollar decrease for a customer with a standard um solid waste cart and i'll put this out to you again shortly and then we are looking to make minimum updates to the contracted rates um valet rates commercial rates and the gate disposal rate this is the five-year forecast with a solid waste fund um so similar to the utilities i'll start here in the adopted 2020 budget and you can see we had a budget with planned use reserves of three million dollars um this did did not include any rate changes um and then you can see any fund balance about 8.1 million and this does fall above or is above the maximum reserve requirement for the adopted budget moving into the end of your estimate for 2020 you can see that covid revenue impact number of 280 000 as i'd said with the other utilities we will come back in december and update the pub and city council regarding the impact of covid to the utilities we do plan to finish the year a little bit positive about 1.4 million in the solid waste fund moving into the adopted or proposed budget 2021 and you can see in this dotted line we currently do have reserve usage of planned of 4.3 million total expenses of 44.1 for an ending fund balance about 8.3 million down here you can see the reserve targets so the minimum being 6.2 and the maximum being 7.9 so we are within that target and you can see we stay within the target for the five years slightly dropping below in 2025 then mayor protem i wanted to point out really quick so the contracted waste agreement you can see from 22 to 23 um this pro forma and the proposed rate decrease does anticipate those wholesale agreements going away in fiscal year 2023 so you can see the decrease from 39.5 million to 34.5 million and i think nick if you could go back to that slide his other question had to do with the debt service line that you can see that the strategy has been reduced to debt gradually over time from you know 8.9 million last year in 2023 when those contracts fall off we're down to 3.9 million so the debt has been cut from essentially nine down to four million dollars which is allowing us that flexibility that we were looking for it's a great point and then the continued focus in this fund and contributing to that debt decreasing is cash funding so as i mentioned a couple slides ago that sale development was moved to 2021 from fiscal year 2022 we are looking to pay cash that next sale development so you can see the 6.25 million plugged in for revenue funding so that is attributing to that decreased debt service and this is the five-year capital plan for the solid waste fund we are looking to issue minimum debt in 2021 of three million dollars this is for a fleet annex building at the solid waste facility so that's three million dollars for that and you can see that revenue funded capital that i pointed out to you on the five-year forecast is 6.2 million vehicle replacement the fund is looking to pay cash the vehicles of 3.4 million total capital improvements of 12.6 in 2021 over the five-year period it does total 41.5 million dollars the rate changes we are proposing to council on the public utility board this fiscal year the first one being a change to our valet share services for the tier two rate currently that rate is 138.28 based on our internal cost of service model we are recommending to decrease this rate to 74.16 and the second one we're looking to do is the yardway service for commercial businesses this rate currently does not exist we are looking to start this next fiscal year and we do want to have a rate of 75 dollars per hour built on 15 minute increments and the standard cart so a five percent rate decrease for the standard cart customer they will see a dollar decrease per month for a large cart that five percent works out to about a dollar 22 and you can see that number out here to your right and then an additional large cart so if someone calls in wanting an additional refuse cart we are looking to reduce that rate from 17.38 to 16.57 the gate disposal rate we are looking to increase it from 46 to 48 so a two dollar increase the sludge and a dewatered landfill we're looking to increase it from 46 to 50 one other thing i do want to point out to the council we are looking to make an adjustment to the put or pay agreements or wholesale agreements of 2.3 percent and this is based on the contracts and this adjustment does account for an additional 400,000 dollars revenue in the solid waste fund this is the slide that you'd seen before so for a solid waste customer that has a standard cart they will see a dollar decrease of five percent so overall for all the utilities would be a decrease of two dollars and eight cents and this is the future slide so september 15th the budget adoption tax rate and capital and print plan with that mayor that concludes the departmental presentations thank you uh council member briggs i think you had some questions that were left over from the operational side you had some budgetary questions oh well the main the main one is that i wanted to make sure that the software um the the routing software was included in this um in this budget going forward since it's really important it is okay all right okay uh mayor pro tem i think you had your hand up did you not yes thank you briefly just wanted to uh say that's absolutely amazing uh on the the debt work to to recover from kind of some some tough decisions that missed uh so in a relatively short amount of time and it was on purpose right it's like hey here's what we're trying to do uh targeted and and achieved so that i just want to say thank you for that okay uh anybody else council member marmotor i think i saw your hand yes go ahead uh yes so uh let me see if i can find the slide okay i i can't find the slide but i will ask i believe it was uh 48 dollars that were that were charging uh outside uh uh entities to uh dispose in in our landfill up two dollars am i remembering that right for the sludge is that what you're talking no no just for the just just for waste 46 that it's a two dollar increase that is correct um the gate rate um for outside city didn't it would be 46 to 48 so it's a two dollar increase the sludge rate we're looking to increase from 46 to 50 so a four dollar increase okay yeah and and so uh what what's the argument against charging more than that you know especially as we um are you know as as there are fewer options around you know how much competition we have what's the because i take it looking at the competition was part of the what was involved in making that decision there's a little bit um the the putter pay agreements we've essentially entered into contracts with them so we're just we're just enforcing the contracts the sludge uh pricing we are capturing our cost of service and then some it has started it is definitely discouraged uh the sludge dewatering uh you know from i guess the volumes that we were seeing uh initially so and this kind of answer we could probably push that as far as we wanted to um you know but that that was the big issue is how do we disincent uh taking in sludge in particular but with the other ones are just purely contractual agreements as you saw in the pro forma they're matched up with when our debt uh significantly drops off here in a couple of years well and thank you and so i would recommend uh for the sludge if if that's the case that we uh you know raise it as high as as we possibly can to de-incentivized disincentivized what uh so i'd be curious to know my colleagues what they think and also just out of curiosity what you think that number would be we would probably need to take a look at it and get back to you right now um i'd really like to talk to brian just to see what you know just how much of a reduction in in uh that we've seen in in that particular area but i know it's been pretty significant excellent okay excellent thank you council member briggs so clarification uh piggybacking off that question that council member armenter had so it was my understanding uh from the presentation in the chart that the land wholesale volumes were the putter pay and that was down but the land retail volumes were up over 35,000 tons and so i think question was so we're increasing that rate by two dollars is that for for the retail sales i mean is that correct that's correct we're increasing the retail people coming in the landfill non-city didn't residents from 46 to 48 that is okay so i guess my question is is there um is there a reason why that isn't higher if that's the one that's bringing in the most tonnage at this point to our landfill it was just simply policy direction received a year ago from the council if council wants to revisit that we can certainly do that okay thank you council member melcher yeah um if we don't want the sludge are we are we required to take it at at some price and that's why there's a discussion of setting the price or you know or again that's my question or or would it be our option to just not take sludge councilman member melzer uh our permit allows us to take sludge uh and we currently take sludge from city of denton uh facilities in addition to outside facilities uh so for us to completely close the landfill to sludge it would have an effect on what city of denton utilizes that for so it's important for us to maintain operations uh but still incentivize or try to disincent it other folks from from bringing the material here let me sharpen the question that i mean i wasn't trying to keep city of denton from doing what city of denton needs to do um but our is the point of having a price for outside sludge to monetize it or you know would it is or if we take our own sludge are we required to take uh you know foreign sludge as well that's a good question um and you know having no don't answer now it sounds like you want to think i need to think about that from a policy and a regulatory stand yeah okay thank you anybody else one one observation is why you know we're we're dealing with this budgetary question uh for the city of denton landfill and trying to figure out how we provide the best services to our citizens just want everybody to understand that as we're asking for increases in non-customers coming to this landfill that if we ever wind up in a position where we don't have a landfill then we will be part of that customer base that someone else is asking at another landfill can we not raise their rates so uh let's just make sure we keep all that in mind in these budgetary discussions any other question on the operational side or the financial side er if i could just before i know you're wanting to wrap this up but i i just wanted to really reinforce with danny you've heard from dan kramer and brian and and frank today um ethan is also missing and tony from this conversation but when we started you know dealing with the covet situation putting our plans in place there were some important questions asked a lot of you have asked about the the number of positions that haven't been backfilled um you know what the strategy is we've tried to re-emphasize that we're not seeing a level of service decreases throughout the city and really the question was asked of that group when we hit covet is if we were to establish these departments today and there was no walls between the departments there was no silos that existed they shared equipment they could share staff they could be more nimble what could we look like and you know so while you're seeing these department by department the city is you know you know very much pushing a philosophy where we share personnel we share equipment with the bottom line being having as little of an impact on the taxpayer and the rate payer as possible so i just want that question that that philosophy to be out there as long as we're not seeing service level decreases there was a real price to pay for being so siloed okay and that's something that we've really been able to question through the code environment is how can we how can we partner better really for the taxpayer to reap the benefits council member armature real quick we're gonna wrap this up yeah i just wanted to say real quick that i've been recognizing that and i i appreciate it i'm really excited about that um as terrible as covet has been there are some lessons that we've learned about about how to proceed post-covid and so i'm really impressed and pleased with that thank you okay all right all right we're going to take a break and we're going to go ahead and take a break till 12 just so that everybody so you all can if you need to get lunch or something and and we will get some lunch here and we'll come back at 12 o'clock to start i guess the the regular sort of budget presentation so we'll reconvene at 12 o'clock welcome everybody back to this meeting of the dent city council on august the 6th 2020 it's 12 11 p.m now and we're moving through our work session report our only work session report of the day it's 1a id 20-1154 and we will uh proceed with the presentation good afternoon mayor members of council david gaines assistant finance director i'm going to go through our our total proposed budget in this presentation as nick mentioned earlier your proposed budget books were delivered yesterday uh yesterday afternoon yesterday evening obviously there's a lot of material in there and we'll have multiple meetings following this one over the next few weeks where we're available to answer any questions as we move forward i do want to use this time to to thank the entire finance staff and the budget staff for the amount of work that they put into getting to this point and also to to all the departments um on all their their presentations and the detail that went into the budget to where we are today i hopefully those all the department presentations that we've had i just need a book oh have have uh we'll make this this presentation more seamless as we move forward um and you can see the the net result of all of those um those presentations you've seen thus far so here the the presentation objectives that we'll go through start off talk about the the covid financial response timeline and what led us to this point uh our proposed budget priorities have an overview of the finances and you can see all the other um all the other items that we'll touch on until we get to the end of the presentation so i think this is a great way to set the stage as we go into the proposed budget uh discussion for fy 21 this year obviously uh in reaction to to the to covid pandemic our budget process essentially really started in march as we reacted to the the fiscal component of the pandemic and anticipated revenue losses we've been coming to council consistently with updates on on our our assumptions and our steps to to mitigate those losses um as long as as long as in addition the operational costs associated with covid 19 so you can see in march as we start to take those initial actions uh and forecast forecast revenue decreases and operational expense increases in april was a significant month as we came to council laying out those options and and the steps that we would take one of those significant decisions that was made was to enact the voluntary separation program which which obviously we enacted ultimately saw the results of here in the last couple of months and you'll see that as we go through the presentation and we see the total number of positions that will be decreasing into the next fiscal year really as largely a result of the the voluntary separation program and you've obviously seen those impacts in each of the presentations that's that have been presented to you so far from the departments notably in may and a very significant um event was getting the the 7.6 million in denton county funding for cr for uh from the from the cares act the crf funding and important to continue to note that those those aren't intended to fill budget gaps are intended to uh offset costs related to covet 19 but definitely a significant amount of money coming in to offset those costs which sets us up in a better position and then we've continued to receive the sales tax numbers received in june we received april numbers and in july we received the main numbers and so as we talk through the sales tax uh our sales tax estimates here in the coming slides you'll see that we're we're in better shape than we thought we would be and even the the numbers you see there as far as what our revenue loss we assumed in june has changed now in august based on getting sales tax numbers that have come in more positive than we then we assumed with our conservative projection so you'll see the the net impact of that as we move forward so here are the here are six six of the priorities that we that we as an organization uh focused on as we put together the fy21 budget the first one there is really a continuation of the slide prior and all of the actions that we've taken that we took to to mitigate any any losses this fiscal year and continue that moving forward we're really asked all departments and and ultimately the proposed budget you have in front of you is a baseline budget which continues those cost containment strategies and really uh limited supplemental increases and you'll obviously you'll notice that is a difference from our budget discussions in prior years where we spent a lot of time talking about those increases that we have to the budget those new programs and really just don't have many of those as we approach this with that baseline budget perspective and that goes right into the next next priority of limiting impact to residents with one no increases or or decreases which obviously you'll see in in water and solid waste on on the utility rate side and then having a property tax rate out of below the no new revenue rate which i'll refer to going forward but just for reference that was the effective tax rate in prior years the obviously the third bullet point close out previous bond programs and execution of the 2019 bond program as we have issued our final issuance just in the in the past few days of our 2014 program and begun the process begun the initial issuance and execution of the 2019 program you'll see the impact of that on our capital improvement plan enhanced funding for street maintenance and inspections we are sending an additional six hundred thousand dollars from the general fund to the streets fund in this budget which was is consistent with with a priority we've placed over the past number of years in prior years of shipping more of our franchise fees to the streets fund we are continuing that investment in the county-wide homeless homeless strategy initiatives and then finally prioritizing investment in public safety and mental health and as i go through the presentation there'll be a number of natural stopping points so can definitely take questions as we go along to wait till the end might be might be a lot of information to to process so the next couple of slides i'll talk through one of the the most significant issues that we faced in developing this budget especially over the next last few weeks and we we brought it up we had an update last thursday during our department presentation budget workshop where we touched on this as well so much of this information is the same and the and the truth is we haven't received any additional information from the appraisal district yet to change any of the information so um is resetting and making making sure council is aware of where we are and and why we're making the decisions we're making and what assumptions we're making moving forward so to to to reset on on everything you see in front of you right now our 2020 appraisal process with the appraisal districts is obviously much different than what we've had in prior years on july 24th we received a certified estimate from the appraisal district as opposed to a certified total which we would normally see that is an option that's allowed to the appraisal district in texas code to to provide us a certified estimate instead of a certified total but as you'll see on the next slide it's quite a bit different than what we normally have the information that we have at this point you'll see we have about 40 of our protest values outstanding right now whereas normally at this time we have about two percent of our of our protest of our values outstanding so does create unique challenges as we move forward with the budget itself where we hope to continue to receive receive revised projections from from the appraisal district we have haven't received anything yet following the the report that was that was sent on july 24th but to be honest we have limited information so we're we're working with it the best that we can and we want to our goal is to be as transparent as we can on on what information we have and what assumptions we're making as we develop the budget so based on the on the following slides you'll see that our assumptions right now are for a four percent three point nine to four percent assessed value growth and obviously as we look at the past number of years there's really a large drop off from our prior years increases especially over the past five to six years and then you can see there in 2009 and 10 the impact of the last recession really this chart is showing that percentage growth over over each year in our assessed values this table again another table that you saw last week but to highlight the amount that we have outstanding right now the you can see that with the 40 outstanding from what we received from the appraisal district so if you look at look at that table in front of you you'll see on the left the eight point eight eight point seven million a billion is our certified value that we received from the appraisal district so those values are not under protest and and we're confident in moving forward the five point six five point seven billion is the the values that are currently under protest and then the the column to the right is what we are assuming for our budget purposes of what that how much of those protests will be upheld as as we try to estimate what our total assessed value is so we're using an 85 percent number of that total and and we'll talk more in the coming slides of why we why we're making that assumption moving forward and what that means if numbers don't come in the way that we're estimating so this this hits more more to the point on the 85 on this slide so i'll talk to the slide on your left first that's a state calculated assessed value and this is a calculation of our assessed value using the lowest uh the lowest number from protest value so essentially as um as taxpayers go to the appraisal district and say i i'm protesting the value that my my house was set at and i'm going to i'm going to come back with this this figure for the value that's essentially what that is when you see the 4.3 billion so feel confident that would be the lowest possible assessed value we would have going into the next fiscal year again based on the numbers provided by the appraisal district so that comes out to about 11.3 billion you can see there on that where we call the certified estimate and that would be uh roughly equal to our current assessed value roughly equal to one percent above our current assessed value these numbers are important because it based on state statute and the calculations that we have on those no new revenue rates and voter approval rates this this is the number that we use for those so you can see there below on the left that 61.6 cents would be the no new revenue rate and is the no new revenue rate that we'll be posting moving forward and then the 63.5 cents is our voter approval tax rate which obviously we've had a number of discussions over the past year or so of that change in the voter approval tax rate to three and a half percent cap on what rate we can go up to on the right you can see our budget assumption so the difference between what's what you see on the right in the table and what you see on the left is we've we've taken 85 percent of those protested values and used that to calculate our av for the budget itself so if you see that that second row that 4.8 billion on the right versus the 4.3 billion on the left is the in additional amount that we're assuming will come in for budget purposes from those protested values and that would equate to about a four percent uh increase over last year's certified values and and we are proposing to keep the tax rate as it currently is which is roughly equivalent to how we would calculate a no new revenue rate based on those assumptions so obviously by going forward in this manner we're making a lot of assumptions on 40 percent of our total assessed value so that does create risk and we're not going to be exactly right on what assumptions we make so this table is intended to to show what that means as we move forward so if you see there on the column second to the to the right that's essentially our budget the numbers that you just saw at our tax rate and what that total levy would be if in fact 85 percent of the protested values are are upheld and so you can see our total levy of the 69.9 million dollars so what we've done here is try to make it as clear as possible well what if it doesn't come in at 85 what if it comes in at say 87 on the right and we keep our same tax rate because we haven't got we haven't received additional information from the appraisal district we set our tax rate under the assumptions of 85 we could over collect by 670 thousand dollars compared to our budget on the two columns to the left of the 85 percent you can see okay if we get 82 percent of those protested values in our levy will under collect by about 900 thousand to a million dollars and then on the farthest to the left that lowest value that that we refer to for the state calculations if that those all were true that kind of the the floor would be a levy that produced 1.8 million dollars less than our budget anticipated so those are all the those are all the slides on the assessed value issue i can definitely stop and answer any questions related to those yeah if we could that'd be great questions councilmember briggs my question is about the slide because the one i have in the presentation the numbers are different the id is still the same but on levy difference on lowest value mine says 1.904 there was a we were this slide obviously came up pretty late we were working on it there was just a slight number that was off on that deduction from the frozen values and ters so we just wanted to get that updated what was presented and we'll update it online but the total numbers don't change too much based on that that small change so what i'm looking at in your presentation is the correct slide correct okay all right thank you we'll get that updated okay yeah i've just got a couple questions david on slide six let me and i there's a well no never mind let me look at slide seven because i marked them as we're going but i wanted to make sure okay so yeah slide uh seven which was the last or nine which was the last one you did um and we can just uh we don't need to pull it up when you say the lowest value that the state's is the state's calculation is that 80 percent of what we still have outstanding i mean how did they calculate that lowest value that was provided by the appraisal district so okay our assumption is from them that's the values that as as the protests come for those are the values that the um residents or property owners are saying is the the value that they're coming back and and and protesting okay all right it's a little bit less than 80 percent of the total okay all right and first of all i you know i appreciate you having this slide i think it's very helpful um to see because i think some of the concern we've had is we're sort of taking a stab in the dark about how we set our tax rate and what our taxpayers can expect with some type of predictability on as they plan to uh you know as they plan for their tax property tax expenses here at the end of the year in the first part of january so when i look at the slide that was this just up at the 87 percent level and i see that if they come in at 87 percent of the five plus billion that we had um we're at six hundred and seventy thousand dollars you're you're calling it over collected but it's six hundred and seventy thousand dollars it's a difference between what we were really wanting to do which is which is no new taxes than than what because we didn't have the information right at the time for the calculation would it be uh is would that be a sort of a linear function whereas if if it was almost 90 percent or 89 percent that you could maybe just sort of double that i mean and come up that it'd be almost 1.34 million that might be uh in addition is would that be a pretty decent estimation of definitely linear so as you go out it's going to just go up in that same increment right okay because my my thought is i'm really surprised honestly at from a 12 increase last year to a four percent and you're saying if it comes in at 85 percent that is only a four percent increase over last year right and that includes new value new construction that's all in okay um that would shock me because based upon what i've heard the the protests and the data being used is not supposed to take into account the pandemic simply because these values are supposed to be those that were determined as of january 1 of this year 2020 and i mean that would be what is that a 75 percent decrease in the growth uh from 12 to 4 percent you've got a you know a reduction um do you have any um that's my biggest concern because even if it comes in at an eight percent you know the always doubled to four from four percent to eight percent then that means that 85 percent level that we're calculating um and maybe that's the question i have is if we go to 87 percent were you able to calculate what percentage increase above or you know from last year that would that would indicate or um we can do that pretty quickly probably during the meeting um and i would just say the you know the reason we chose 85 percent uh is because last year 87 if you look at all of our protests last year 87 was the number that came out i think right the complications are there are exponentially more protests this year than last year so does that change that calculation and we just don't have the information from the appraisal district to give us any better estimate right now so we're just really going to go with the information we have sure do you recall what um the notice values before any protests what the notice values were as far as percentage increase from our certified role last year so it would be the the eight billion and the five point it is 13 billion i think we're right around 10 percent on on that and that was kind of the number that we were referring to as we went through the process what that total is okay good all right well and needless to say uh of course everybody's been hit uh during the pandemic with processes that need to be changed and and you know the dent county appraisal districts uh central appraisal districts no different uh and we certainly understand that and we are in conversations with them to try to get us some additional information or updates as we move forward so that we can have a little bit more predictable information as we set this budget uh for our taxpayers so that we're not you know having either dig into the the general fund because we've we've under assessed or we're sort of over assessing in a time when people really need every dollar that they can that they can keep so it's imperative that we continue to at least get something uh some type of update uh from the central appraisal district would you agree with that absolutely and and obviously our plan is to come back to you every time we get more information if if we need to if if we need to recommend a rate adjustment we do it at that time but at least show you what it looks like and what information we're going on so hopefully we can get that number about 40 reduced right and we can have more confidence in the number okay great thank you and again i appreciate that last slide because i think that's very helpful just to see the impact of the lack of predictability and up-to-date information uh that that we need so thank you so much for that all right any questions so far on assessed values and things such as that okay thank you david you may proceed one of the numbers that we've shown over the past three years as we've seen um the implementation of the of the over 65 tax freeze is trying to equate what that means for the city and reduce tax revenue based on our tax rate so that's what this table is intended to do so if you kind of if you see on the left it's freeze taxable those are the actual uh taxable values that are under that are frozen properties that are removed from the slide that you saw previously and then we know the amount that the revenue we should levy we should receive from those freeze properties so we can internally come up with what does that mean for the taxable value that we're actually giving a levy on and that's how we walk forward to the final um column that just tries to estimate the amount of tax revenue that we're that we're not receiving as a city just simply based on those those um those properties being being frozen i will say we anticipated to see that number continue to increase as especially over three to five years as more people more properties got onto the frozen um value so it was surprising to see that kind of level off based on the numbers the appraisal district gave us uh but those are those are the numbers that we have right now so just wanted to keep keep council update on that as that's been those have been numbers that we've referenced over the past few budget cycles so here's our tax rate um and again a table that we've shown over the past few years for the average tax bill based on our tax rate obviously um over the past eight or nine years we've seen a steady decrease a pretty significant decrease in our total tax rate and you can see that they're just from 2017 on to to where we were in 2020 over from 68 cents to 59 cents and we are recommending right now based on the assess value discussion that we just had that we stay at our current tax rate going into the next fiscal year that does include an increase of half a cent um or a half a cent on the debt service side and a decrease of half a cent on the operations side um you'll notice when you look at the average taxable value column which again this is uh numbers that we consistently show to council that we're using the same average taxable value that we had last year and that's because the numbers that we got from the appraisal district obviously are still in flux and and uh with the 40 under protest but also they do give us a number for average taxable value but it was it was less than what we had last year so for consistency we didn't want to show it that way um just because we think it's unlikely that our average values in the city reduced obviously so we we're showing the average taxable value at the same as last year just for the purposes of this chart if we get additional information on what that number is we will we'll surely update this table moving forward so one of the one of the things that we like to do as well is is what view those and goes back to those priorities that we have when we set the budget is view the the property tax bill for for residents um along with what are they paying in their utility bills so you can see on the top there just with continuing the same tax rate and assuming the same taxable value would be no increase on the property tax bill and then on the utility bill you can see that average annual decrease there of 24 based on a two percent reduction in the water rates which we discussed earlier and also the one dollar per month decrease in solid waste rates rates which were also discussed in in the prior presentation so sales tax collections uh we we've now had a number of iterations of our sales tax projections since march since the onset of coven 19 and the and the ensuing impact to the economy each time that we come back they they have been slightly better than what we projected during the prior iteration so far through may we're actually essentially on budget with what we projected for the fiscal year from sales tax that's largely driven by number one throughout october through february before the impacts of the pandemic we were over budget we were our sales tax was trending higher than budget and then for may and for april and may or march through may really our numbers have not come in as as negative as we as we as we feared or as we conservatively projected so we're at a spot now where we can we're really only showing that one one and a half million dollar decrease from our current budget in sales tax projections through the rest of the fiscal year and i and i i do believe that's still a conservative approach and that's assuming the 10 reduction for june through september we are continuing that 10 reduction from october through march in the fy21 budget which leads to our our sales tax figure you see there of 36.4 million in the general fund uh staff will consider we're going to we will be getting our next sales tax number here just in in a few days and and obviously in july so we'll continue to to monitor how those are comparing to our projections and make any adjustments moving forward so here's our again just a history of our sales tax obviously just similar to assess values we see the steady increase in our sales tax projections over the past number of years obviously a leveling off last year and then we're showing our decrease in 2020 and then based on the calculation we had prior with the 10 from october through march decrease from the prior year another decrease in the budget for next year for sales tax so here you can you can see our total pie of of all the revenues in the general fund obviously property tax making up the majority or or most of the largest percentage of our total revenue in the general fund of 38 with sales tax 30 30 you can see our fees and permits use of reserves obviously a big component of that is related to our development services at our cost of cost of service rates which we had that conversation with council just about a year ago today during the last year's budget process as we brought that that study forward and made the decision to to take those fees to a cost of service basis the roi that's obviously our our utilities roi coming to the city and that has changed based on our our action mid-year where we increase the the roi the transfer from dme to six percent to to the city through fy22 general fund expenditure in total 140 million dollars in the general fund and as we always show the the majority of our expenses in the city especially in the general fund our personnel so about 70 percent of our total expenses our personnel and then you can see the the rest of of those categories that make up our budget in total from operations on down cost of service those would be our transfers to the internal service funds from the general fund we do have our compensation and benefits assumptions that are included in in the proposed budget from the general fund out to the utility funds internal service funds these would apply to everyone the first being our civil service pay adjustments there's no change in our plan with civil service pay adjustments these are called out in our meet confer agreements which sets sets our salaries at five percent above above our survey cities and includes the step increases that are noted in the meet confer agreements our budget does include a two uh two and a half to three percent uh pay for pay out for non-civil service employees so just to give some a little more detail on what that is we put into the budget a one-time merit pay for um for employees throughout the city those non-civil service employees of in a range of two and a half to three percent that would not be a salary increase wouldn't be that recurring cost but it would be a essentially a bucket of dollars there to give one-time increases or one-time payments to employees as a way to know that given where we are right now in the uncertainty we're not comfortable moving forward with that additional recurring cost but at least we can give something that's a one-time um one-time incentive for those employees our health insurance we have no changes to our city contribution our health health insurance fund continues to remain healthy with a strong fund balance so no need for a change in contributions at this time and then our retire on retirement our tmrs rate which all employees are in outside of fire pension it does increase from 17.4 percent to 17.7 percent and that's the contribution from the city from the employer side and then our fire pension rate remains at 18.5 percent so to continue on with positions and obviously this ties directly to our conversations on the voluntary separation program and the detail that you saw with each of the departments in total we are we as a baseline we removed 85.8 fte's from the city which goes across all funds and we have implemented the process to get to that 85 ft removal of all positions being evaluated before they are refilled so after starting with the 85 positions that were removed we have added 11 positions or new fte's to the budget which you've seen in those individual presentations the six police positions which were detailed on tuesday three fire positions those fire positions are for fire station eight and we also have our funded um a portion are funded through a safer grant so that's included in our in our total forecast moving forward and then the two new legal positions that were discussed earlier today so the net reduction after those 11 additions is a 74.8 fte reduction from a city-wide standpoint so here you can see the the detail of what makes up that 85 number and then the ultimately the 74.8 net reduction number by fund and total in the general fund we actually remained about even going into the budget year and that's because we've reduced 11 positions from the general fund but then obviously all 11 of those positions that were referenced are in the general fund and then amongst our other funds you can see that 74 fte reduction so here's our this is our five-year forecast that implements essentially all the other information and assumptions that we've had moving moving toward this point uh we we in the fiscal year if you're just jumping straight to the bottom line uh the current fiscal year with it with a surplus based on these assumptions next year we have a balanced budget and then in the out years um we have some deficits which obviously are tied to a number of assumptions in the five-year plan but we do remain here in the next few years within our fund balance target of 20 to 25 percent david before we move in to the financial forecast of general fund i want to see it through i had a couple questions on the slides prior and and just some general questions um on a slide well the last slide talked about the 85 i think fte reduction how many of those were the voluntary separation program do you know we had about i think we had just about 85 i think it ended up being 87 total vsp positions okay but not all of not all of those were the vsp positions because we also had our hiring freeze so all those positions had to come back and that was kind of goes to the point that todd touched on earlier of reassessing each department and looking at how would you set this department up from from the start so but it does roughly equate to our vsp okay and on slide 17 where it talks about the tmrs payment of 17.76 so that's money that is contributed that's in the budget right that goes to the tmr system for employees for their retirement is that and so but we also part of the benefits we're also paying the employer portion of social security is that correct i mean there's a portion taken out of the employees pay but then as normal we also provide the employee portion of which is what six percent seven percent between those okay so in essence the city of denton is providing close to 23 percent retirement benefits when you add the tmrs plus the social security to to our employees which i think everybody would say is is very you know that's that's very robust and and a very very good benefit i just want to make sure i understood that that it wasn't part of that 17.76 social security that's in addition to that okay all right okay any other general questions before we go into the the the meat potatoes are the numbers council member briggs could you could you go over the merit increases again because i i didn't really understand what you meant on um i was under or thought that there was a reason that there was not going to be any merit creases increases so um which which i'm okay so is it just the one time um for all employees and it's if you can explain that and just to make sure that it's for all employees yeah i'll kind of i'll kind of jump in there we have been working with our internal team right now as our budget has stabilized one of the promises we made to the employees is once we had two or three months of data back on how the economy was doing how our assumptions were doing that we would possibly look at reinstating those merit increases for the last half of the year so we are in the process of doing that at this point and that's been factored in i was critical to get all of our employees back on the same page so we didn't have half the workforce that got raises and the other half didn't that was a a significant problem something that was concerning to us so we've let the organization know that we're trying to deal with that it's starting with the october 1 budget so that should be completed by the end of this fiscal year starting with the october 1 budget what we've tried to do is build in at a minimum one-time merit increases for the employees that are non-civil service they would not so it would not necessarily raise your your base pay from for the next few years towards compounding but it would be kind of one-time payments that would be given pots of dollars given out to the department directors to work with hr with and but not necessarily a salary increase that goes on in perpetuity that was just sort of something we felt like we could at least make that pledge that we could fund that we just didn't feel comfortable handing the comp handling the compounding out for three four five years if we started elevating base wages again this year sure yeah i thank you i'm glad to hear that that's more equalized and and brought to to all employees now have have we ever considered or is that is that one time is it going to be like a flat rate instead of a percentage of an income or will it still stay as a percentage the idea would be that finance hr would work with each department director provide a calculation based upon their payroll and they would be allowed to to then divvy that out based on performance okay all right thank you councilmember marmotor then councilmember melzer uh yeah so uh has the uh cost of living that increase to the cost of living gotten uh factored in and that decision is that considered when we think about uh just you know the decision to uh to to increase or salaries or not but we don't we haven't included a kind of a cost of living analysis to come to the three percent but i think that's naturally part of why we have those increases moving forward um you know it's obviously part of our having a competitive compensation plan is is having those increases and having that available so i think it all ties together but we it's not tied to any kind of cost of living metric well so so you're talking about the one-time merit increases i mean when deciding so in the decision not to raise the salaries but it sounds like the answer would be the same that it's um yeah i think we're i think where we are is we don't feel comfortable right now in light of what david just took you through with the property taxes in particular of in of having a compounding effect starting this year on the wage structure i mean wages are about 70 of the general funds costs and looking out right now until we have more certainty on the property tax we just didn't feel like we could make that promise and without causing a problem in the next year or two so we feel comfortable that we can handle that at least from a one-time perspective and if there's any issues out there in terms of real significant pay disparities the hr and tiffany got the ability to deal with those immediately anyway but we wanted to recognize the fact that we've had several non-public safety employees keep the plates spinning in this government operating during this pandemic so we felt it was like it was something that we could commit to and we could fund we just did not feel comfortable adding another couple million dollars to the general fund to compound on the next four or five years without putting ourselves in a little bit of a pickle i'm so i myself would support would prefer the you know a couple million dollars not added on but but taken from elsewhere without without raising the tax rate especially with concern to pay equity i know there hasn't been a study done around i don't know when the last time it was a study done of pay equity for for city staff but i think for our economy even though not all city staff lives in the city of denton you know as the cost of living increases i think that we need to do uh all that we can to to keep up and try to figure out in terms of salary you know what we can move around uh from from other from from other budgets i'm not saying that two million or however much it would be more from just one budget but a little bit from all around so i will i will be looking um and i would love to know not necessarily now you mentioned a couple million what the uh comparative costs would would be of a of uh raises i will tell you having been working on this the last four or five months there's not a couple million dollars of of moving things around in the general fund at this point i mean it would basically would be down to either not backfilling some positions or even reducing transfers uh for instance like in the streets that sort of thing i just felt like that was probably the wrong move i also want to kind of correct the pay study that that just wasn't correct information each year we've had a certain percentage of the organization where we've actually gone out and reviewed their compensation we tried to do it in three four five year increments with these departments so we were getting as up-to-date information as possible there are still some um positions within the city that are highly um i guess sought after out there the pandemic of course is tempered a little bit but the construction jobs i can't tell you in in the three and a half years i've been here how many times we've studied construction workers pay uh frontline employees pay um electric line distribution pay that sort of thing so we are constantly going through that exercise depending on where the market is and where we're seeing turnover making sure that we are as competitive as possible so it's something that's just done as a matter of routine we don't wait for an emergency we just simply do that when we're seeing these trends and and thank you thank you for clarifying that i told i understand that we that we regularly assess you know in terms of competitiveness i mean in terms of a pay equity audit for instance and i'll just say without belaboring the point you know i respectfully disagree but i i do see um areas elsewhere in the general fund uh where uh where we could shift shift money into me into uh salaries but uh but that but that's just my personal opinion and i respect all the work that that has gone into this and i really appreciate uh the the effort to do a one-time merit increase as opposed to nothing so i definitely like that better than nothing thank you yeah council member melser um just like a language suggestion is don't call it an increase because it's not an increase it's like an award or a bonus something like that um and then uh you know this is kind of an unusual situation we're accustomed for decades we're seeing cost of living go up and just in varying amounts but the consumer price index for talus for work is actually negative right down a half a percent um yeah that's it yeah council member melzer thank you for that i think that's important because when we're talking about trying to structure the budget and making proposals based upon data we want to make sure we have the most up-to-date data and i so therefore i'm very comfortable with with what the city manager has done i don't think i mean if you council member marmotor if you're going to find two million dollars you're going to find it by reducing the budget somewhere else because there's not two million dollars lying around so that's just personal preference and if you have those recommendations you can certainly push those forward but i think the city manager's done a great job and let me let me emphasize again the city of denton pays 23 plus percent towards employees retirement does anybody on this panel outside of city staff get 23 percent retirement benefits outside of of government work let's say government work in private sector work probably not so i think the i think the employees even though right now they may not be looking at a quote unquote merit increase as compared to a one time but how many people are in our community that you know we're trying to help as desperately as we can because they don't they don't have the funds to meet their needs so i think we need to we need to be realistic about what the circumstances are and the facts especially the facts if you're going to bring up proposals based upon facts so the consumer price index being a negative means people have more buying power than what they did when it was zero or one or two percent so an increase of two percent or three percent means that they're they're getting more buying power than with that negative number so okay i'm trying to think if there's any other question i had oh on the sales tax uh where's david david right there david on the sales tax the 10 reduction from was it july to september is that i think there was is that right june through september june through september we're going to get the new numbers here just in a couple days okay what is that reduction uh what is that specific reduction dollar amount in other words you're saying that in that time frame it's going to be what two million dollars less or we're right on budget through may so when we say that one and a half million that we're we're projecting the end of the year under budget that is exactly what that half one and a half million is just because we're right on budget where we are right now okay um and if if the numbers come in uh because i i think okay let me go back to that slide because i thought our budgeted sales tax was 39 million i think or is that the proposed let me look what slide was that um oh here it is uh okay so our projected well our budgeted 2020 sales tax was adopted was 39 million is that right yes okay and you're projecting that um it's going to come in at about 37 million 1.5 million what are you projecting it's going to come in at i'm looking on the slide i'm trying to figure it out 37 million all right so then if some reason it comes in better than that course we're going to know i guess here in a couple of days or another week or so for june but by the time we really get around to try to really solidifying the the budget we're still going to be waiting for august and september numbers is that correct because august comes at the middle of september yeah so that because we we're going to look at adopting the budget about the middle yeah so um i guess then based upon the july numbers then there may be some opportunity to adjust that if they don't come in as bad as what we might be anticipating only reason i'm saying this is if we realize an extra million dollars in savings i mean in sales tax revenue that we're not projecting for uh this budget year then we're able to come back and adjust it for the next budget year because a million dollars i think is a penny on our tax rate uh is that correct yes yep okay all right so we have some flexibility as these numbers come in to make the adjustments either way depending on on what they are correct okay all right fantastic and mayor i think the policy discussion we're going to have with you is if we still don't have the any further clarification on the on where the appraisal district lands we may very well just recommend you keep that status quo as a hedge in case it doesn't hit the 85 percent sure so that that extra money would be something that would be and just i think we talk about this every year transfers or i'm sorry cost of service are those transfers correct all right um so when i'm looking at 140 million dollar budget and i'm going to for the sake of discussion just say that's 10 transfers instead of 12 cost of service 10 because that'd be easy math so that's not necessary that's money coming in either it's money within the general fund that we're just sort of saying hey if accounting is doing work for the city manager's office we are going to budget them a certain amount of that but if it's outside of the the the general fund are those actual those are actual dollars that are flowing in is that correct like from the utility fund from the utility funds and and things such that those are actual that's actual cash flow that comes into the general fund is that correct correct it's actual transfers from the utility funds and our internal service and special revenue funds and they're based on a number of different metrics that we sure hr would be kind of the number of employees that you have legal would be the number of cases things like that um number of reviews accounting maybe then the amount of dollars so just a number of different right okay all right i appreciate that okay thank you any other questions yes councilmember melzer yeah just to uh you know add a gloomy note of caution um i think there's there's we all ought to be really closely watching the um the uh corona you know cares act follow-up discussions on the hill just because the sales tax is very much supported by those extra payments going into you know the bank accounts of unemployed people i think last number i saw we're still about about eight percent uh and that's probably five points higher than we're accustomed to being around here so you know there's there's downside risk sure okay all right any other questions before we move into the sort of the specific numbers and forecasts okay david you may proceed so um i already touched on the high level numbers in our in our five-year forecast you can see the property tax as it moves as it moves forward in our out years on the property tax we're still keeping the the tax rate at the um at the the no new revenue rate just the o n m no new revenue rate so just as a as a mechanism to to not have the tax rate um just stay steady uh in in the future years and then on the sales tax essentially just kind of tying with the numbers that that you're recalling mayor you can see that reduction of about a million and a half from this fiscal year and then a further reduction next year just based on additional months that 10 reduction you can see the return on investment this is the increase from from dme which obviously is important to point out as it's helped us balance these couple of years we do based on direction from council that roi in our five-year forecast does revert back to its previous level from from dme and you can see that that decrease there in fy23 on personnel services um you really you do see a slight increase just again we're just looking at the general fund here not the entire organization which accounted for those the 70 plus position net reduction so you're seeing the in the new positions added here also the meet and confer agreements and a number of other changes as you look at that the personnel line and then again in total we have a balanced budget this year a projected balanced budget on these assumptions going into next year so if we if we could uh let me let me look at the next slide because what there's going to be a yeah let's see if we have any questions on that slide because some of the other ones are more uh textual in nature they're not necessarily um so any questions on that i just have one or two um any any questions from council members on that five is this the five-year forecast uh right and this is just about this is our last slide and specifically on the general fund so if there's any other questions sure okay yeah um now i know what we used to do and i can't remember if we did it last year but on supplementals we would have sort of supplementals moving forward at a sort of a fixed rate just as a placeholder in the budget that would flow down to uh the uh the bottom line on our on our out years now i don't see that here uh is there could you share maybe what the rationale was for that i because we didn't really have supplementals going into this year just we wanted to take the same approach to the whole five-year forecast of this is a baseline budget as much as okay and then the same so obviously as we go forward next year and we have different realities we would include that so then in some of our departmental budget presentations there were i mean not very many but there were some that were titled supplemental requests so those would not be included in this particular slide is that correct correct those those are all all of those have been funded that you saw so they're in the budgets and those were viewed as really baseline adjustments all those that were that were added were these are these are additions that help us continue our current level of service so they were just added to the budget moving forward so so for example the one i think off the top of my head because it's one of the last ones was legal legal was asking for two additional positions and i believe something else and so that is in the personnel services budget correct is that correct 11 new positions are all in that personnel budget so okay those would probably be the only supplemental increases yeah we could break those out more specifically but that would have been it this year yeah no i think it would be helpful because we saw them as in as individual budget presentations but it'd be helpful just to have them in one place say hey these are the additional requests that some had above their budget last year but they are all already factored in into in the current budget because i really want to just say as an observation and commend city staff and city management because i don't know when the last time i saw and the that's the reason i asked about the supplementals moving forward i don't know when the last time i saw a five-year forecast where it didn't show that our uh fund balance was almost cut in half because of just assumptions and things such as that so um and an assumption on the property valuations were three percent moving forward four percent if i can't remember right we started rationing up in those out years three yeah um so even if we did have quote unquote supplementals that sort of moved forward in these uh out years it would have to be fairly substantial i mean if you had a million and a half or two million a year you're talking about an extra eight million but you're still at 20 million dollars on your ending fund balance and i think uh yeah our our goal is is it 20 to 25 correct or is that right okay all right okay all right any other questions or comments on the general yes council member armature yeah so as far as projecting for for property tax revenue um i assume or we factoring in we're not including these these uh annexations that are up in the air right now that were discussed at the last workstation that that's not exactly no that's what i think oh and i also want to say as an observation that this budget takes into consideration on the return on investment that it drops back down to nine point five million that's a five million dollar drop right which you know you would you would think you would see a huge drop in the fund balance because even if it was so there's obviously there was some additional revenue that was flowing down to the fund balance uh and some of those out here so um okay appreciate it thank you so our next slide is is on our capital improvement plan and the proposed debt issuances that we that we have currently included in the proposed budget so starting from the top is our general government proposed debt these are this is the debt that's paid paid through our debt service portion of our property tax rate so the first first two items there you can see that the streets projects from 2019 bond bond election from our street rehab programs bonnie bray the bonnie bray project our sidewalks programs you can you can see the detail there on that 12.4 million dollars um the police facility projects obviously this will be a significant year for the construction of the rehabilitation project and the um and the substation project and you know as we as we talked about earlier in in the fiscal year and council approved our commercial paper program what that's allowed us to do is issue this debt based on cash flow so when we show that 42.9 million dollars that's what we we plan on on spending based on our current schedule for the police facility projects if we didn't have the commercial paper program we would actually have to issue more than that because we would have to issue the entire amount of those contracts so that that has helped us a concrete example of how it's helped us manage the tax rate the third third item there is another one that we talked to you about a couple a month or so ago when we had our capital projects update and that was the additional 8.9 million dollars that we're planning to issue to wrap up those street rehab street rehab program from 12 and 14 and we went through the the detail of of that with council but obviously could could answer any any additional questions on that and what that has done obviously as well as on that 2019 um final election where we're issuing for streets for the rehab program for the 2019 um rehab program is really focused on design next year as we the intention the first intention number one priority is to close out those 12 and 14 streets we have our vehicle funding our vehicle um replacements that we do with with five-year debt that you can see there of 3.36 million dollars and then our facility improvements which um scott gray our facilities director went over with you in detail during his budget presentation which total 1.48 and those are just those regular maintenance um projects that are needed at our city facilities our next section are our two two projects that are going to be that the debt service will be funded through internal service funds what that means is we won't pay for these projects with our debt service tax rate they'll be paid through the internal service funds and ultimately through transfers um from throughout the city and and on these projects in particular largely from the utilities especially as we look at the 3-1-1 system we'll talk about each of these these um these projects in the in the next two to three slides so i'll give you some more detail on those but that's 4.2 million dollars in total and then our total utilities fund proposed debt of 136 million point 136.4 million dollars again these were all shown in detail during the utility budget presentations but you can see 65.3.03 for electric and on down to just about three million dollars for solid waste so david before you move on from this slide just to you know share if you wouldn't mind sharing with the council uh that you had heard from i believe bond council on the issuance of our debts and just just briefly share with them what those results were and i think and then i want to tie it into what you just presented sure well on on on uh tuesday council approved us moving forward with our bond sale for this fiscal year for fy20 and we that bond sale was this morning so we're still getting getting everything finalized but we do a competitive sell for our for our bonds so we get a number of bids and we had um a lot of interest and our so in each of the debt cells that we did one for geos our general obligations one for co's the geos they came in with an interest rate at a tick of of 1.08 percent which was over 60 basis points lower than we had even projected so the past number of months that's continued to go down um but we really had a good just good timing to get rates that low really lowest rates i've seen um obviously lowest lowest rates we've seen on the municipal market for quite some time so definitely good news and we'll see the impact of that on our forecast and even on the co's side those are always going to be a little bit higher on the rate those came in just over 1.1.6 percent or so so um just great great news all around much better than we we had projected and really happy with the process so we can follow up in a friday report and give you the detail on that what that looks like um but but definitely great news yep council member breaks i was pondering the question um so with with racelet low and such a good um a good response would we be looking at um any of the debt that we've already issued on um refunding that absolutely one of the um one of the the factors that has made that less likely recently is with the the tax law from a number of years ago it we're not allowed to do advanced uh non-taxable refunding so we have to wait until our our outstanding debt becomes callable once we get to that nine 10 year mark to actually refund debt and and keep it non-taxable um which is which is how we how we issue debt one with rates this low it's it may be um an option to to refund those debt that that outstanding debt in advance of when it's callable and just and issue it and refund it as taxable debt so taxable debt's going to be at least probably 80 basis points to a whole percentage higher than non-taxable debt but given rates are this low we may have some some outstanding debts where where it's worth it so we'll definitely include that when we give an update on that friday report just to lay lay it out and likely bring it back to council for consideration okay thank you council member armature so first i want to say that is wonderful news about those interest rates that's incredible um and i look forward to hearing more you know about what you know why uh why this is and um uh but but it's just it's just wonderful timing i wanted to ask um is it possible uh to refinance um municipal bonds like how you know under a new rate like how one would refinance a mortgage on the house you know i'm thinking of uh of some of our especially the deck which is you know our biggest uh debt expense in the city you know could we refinance that under a new interest rate or is is that just not possible we we can and that kind of goes back to the conversation of when we can do it since we actually had a refunding today with the amounts that um that were approved by council on tuesday a significant dollar amount of refunding bonds for debt that had already reached our we have to reach nine or ten years based on the way it's structured for it to be callable and once we hit that time frame then we can go refund it um but at this time we can't do advanced refunding so we can't refund it before that callable that date that we have to hit and it remain non-taxable but one of the options we can lay out is what what does it look like if we consider doing taxable bonds sooner so obviously that would apply to the the deck revenue as well since it's obviously not callable yet okay so so and thank you for mentioning that so um are you saying that and this is a terminology question so refunding when we talk about refunding uh does that mean both uh you know refunding in the colloquial sense plus refinancing essentially we wouldn't extend the terms that we wouldn't say we had eight years remaining we would keep the eight years we wouldn't go out longer or anything like that it wouldn't be a practice that we would go forward with but it's the same idea you try to take advantage of lower interest rates okay okay now i understand thank you that's great so david real quick um on these uh projects that you just had on your last slide sort of summarizing those debts um are those projects would that debt be scheduled to be sold in the fiscal years that why it's it's it's in this budget presentation that that the goal would be to sell that debt in this fiscal year coming up um is that right right okay so then i guess my next question would be as we move through the budget process if you could not today but if you could provide either in a friday report or something if the rates stay like this how can we take advantage of them with the debt that you've outlined in the fiscal 20 uh 21 budget as far as timing because i know all these projects you can't do it once uh but you know just just something in the future on some type of plan just when you come back with the plan if there was a plan for the uh refunding with taxable municipal bonds because the delta that the the difference in interest rates would make it attractive to do that uh you you might include that because i think it's it's important because debt service that's where you can see if you get that kind of a change in an interest rate it makes a tremendous amount of difference on your debt service and so i think it really would behoove us to to really take a deep dive into that as we move into uh this budget this budget cycle absolutely thank you council member melzer yeah thanks um the uh the economic uncertainty out there has had a kind of multiple you know double triple whammy effect on the non-profits that we that we help keep going where they've their donors are have economic uncertainty or aren't giving as much and then they're they were shut out of their main fundraising seasons and they've lost their volunteer force you know uh largely and are we looking at the same amount of of funding that we've done in the past or is there's or is there some you know acknowledgement of that need in this budget and i know everything's tight uh but you know it seems like those are expenses that are going to hit us one way or the other well obviously in this current year's budget we increased um our contributions for some of those homelessness initiatives from the united way kind of the barriers fund and also with with our daily bread so those are all continuing on from those increases last year so i've kind of pointed that and obviously as we start as we continue to have discussions on the new lucre building and what that will look like so i definitely think that will continue to come forward thanks yeah and i thought i saw it one at the bottom of one of the slides that it said it's seven hundred and three thousand dollars for the barriers fund is included in the budget is it or did i misread that well there was it was it was a typo and it was updated it'll be updated on the one that goes out that was really just for homelessness initiatives in total that okay well still i mean so it's it's it's a seven hundred three thousand dollars for homelessness initiatives is included in in the current budget that you presented right okay all right thank you council member briggs and i would uh you know acknowledge that in the sort of pictogram of like the six major principles that you showed you know that continuing to invest in those initiatives is one of the one of the guiding uh thoughts on on this document so so uh just want to acknowledge that okay council member briggs uh just to clarify so that's seven hundred thousand that's from our general fund correct okay and and i will just say to council member melzer because i've had sarah keekler working with several of those groups um they were able we the county was actually able to help us secure some cares act dollars for them to help with uh their staffing needs for the next several months so we feel fairly comfortable with the budget moving forward this coming year um i'm not sure that i can make that same assertion to you in 21 22 but they've been definitely beneficiaries of getting some care act dollars to hire staff and and to help them out that's just it's been a great pressure relief file for everyone yeah that's great appreciate that all right uh david you may proceed um so i do want to touch on those those two projects that were listed from internal service funds um because especially on the 311 program how the department presentations from tech tech services and um and customer service mentioned the 311 program but want to lay out what our what our plans are right now for this and obviously it will continue to come forward to council uh so the goals of a 311 system is really to centralize um the process process improvement analytics for every for for all of our calls and our work orders moving forward across the city um instead of having kind of a disparate number of different work order systems or phone numbers for those from the outside to call 301 really refers to having that one point of contact from um from a resident standpoint of what of who to call or anything kind of customer service related to um a trash pickup to um an issue with a roadway issue and then having a single uh software uh tool that all of our other work order systems talk to each other so can kind of show this a little bit better on on this slide where you can kind of see what the idea is so we have a customer call is um from a number of different from a phone call to an email to utilizing one of our apps that comes in to um representatives to our 301 system and then comes into the software which is what the funding request is for that then takes it out to the departments and i think one of the one of the biggest uh improvements that we'll see it as an organization is this this piece in the middle our um centralized software for um for customer relations and to manage these these requests right now you would see five or six different softwares that would be used for those work orders that don't necessarily talk to each other and we can end up going out or having issues that pop up the same issue in different work order systems and not know it so um this is really going to be a priority for the organization as we move forward to both help residents as they call in have one one point of contact again but also have a more efficient way to use our work order system and get uh tasks accomplished and again we'll continue to bring this forward to you with what this looks like and have a more detailed conversation but for budget purposes we do want to start planning for for it to be included in the budget and then additionally we also again had that 2.9 million dollar debt issuance for expansion of our fleet facility and as this is an internal service fund ultimately that would be just that debt service would be transferred out to all of the operating departments um and addition addition of ultimately addition of 12 repay repair bays to the facility that we that we currently have and i think importantly it expands that capacity as we start looking at what the needs are going to be from now all the way out to to 2030 um really a big need for for the fleet fleet department right now as they look out into those future years and you can again see the timeline how that's going to continue to come back to council as we start moving forward so that's it on the cip i can definitely take it down if you have any questions on those yeah let's take it down but also let's take a quick five minute break we're fixing to get into the electric fund and and so forth so we'll probably be uh spending some time there so let's take a council member Briggs you have a question now or do you want to hold it till we come back from the break i can't hear you okay well it's on this i didn't know if we were moving on to the other funds when we come back we are no no if you if you have a question let's go ahead and resolve it yeah i do i have a question about the um 311 which i think is is really great um my question is does that work in addition with engaged in or is that going to be something separate are they or is it just to engaged in should be able to tie right into it so we can manage requests from service level requests engaged at requests all those will go into one central repository ticket created and it closed out that way okay my next question about that um would non-emergency um calls go through 311 as well that's the plan okay good all right thank you okay anything else all right all right let's come back in about five or ten minutes it's a 128 come back around 135 welcome everybody back to this meeting of the density council on august the 6th 2020 it is 1 40 p.m we're moving through uh we're on the final stretch of our budget presentation work session report id 20-1154 so staff if you're ready you may proceed i'm ready so we've now gone through the general fund and our capital program so the next few slides we'll talk about other funds and start with the utility funds um these these again we'll just look at a very high level on each of the utilities just did a five-year forecast from a five-year forecast standpoint and really just as a touch base on the conversations we've had with council on each of these funds individually and i'll also point out as we start the utility conversations at again this high level that our plan is to bring back in november and december to pub and council a more detailed discussion of how the funds look as we get through these these few months over the summer and we're also we'll be having a more detailed conversation with the pub in the coming month in advance of budget adoption as well so the the electric fund you can see um again at a very high level our our reserves look strong compared to our our targets that you see at the bottom and this budget does include the reduction of the the 20 ftes that we discussed earlier and the increase in the return on investment um to the general fund which you can see for the rest for this fiscal year uh rest of this fiscal year and then the next two fiscal years and you can see that drop off which corresponds to the line that you saw in the general fund as well but again no rate no revenue changes um in in no rate changes in this projection moving forward and um we do have the 21 million dollar included for purchase power for tmpa decommissioning costs are within that purchase power number that you see there again that's that number that 21 million is spread out over a number of years um based on tmpa tmpa's numbers so i will move forward to the other utilities but again we can always come back and if you have any questions on any of the elect any other utility funds specifically i tell you what if we could uh let's see let's go with the let's go to the electric performer and then we'll ask questions on the we'll just ask them by fund uh so yeah let's go to the electric performer then we'll just we'll stop and see if there's any questions on the uh two electrical slides uh so that was the only one for electric i don't oh okay sorry yeah then let's go ahead and uh let's see if there's any questions on that questions on the electrical slide uh councilmembrometer uh so uh two questions one um about uh gibbons creek and i i know we we recently discussed uh the the budget to decommission is there any uh any updates to publicly share since we last heard uh about the status of that sale that might affect the budget not at this point okay thank you um and then if someone could speak to uh you know why is uh how is maintaining the the deck given the the net and energy center the gas plant given the projected uh revenue and uh mno um how is that worth uh you know maintaining versus uh say a decommissioning of the deck and and and by the way and i i understand that we need some source of generation as a hedge uh so i'd just love to hear just to kind of get uh we've got terry nalty on the line and i'll ask terry to to try to answer that question we've asked him to to work with us on a a very short synopsis that we can show that business case each year and so he's working on that but he can probably explain it much more efficiently than we can right now uh good afternoon council terry nalty is the general manager dme the short answer to your question uh council memorandum is that the value that the deck provides in terms of the power and the uh the avoided types of transactions that we would have to do were it not there uh is is more than what it would cost us to replace that particular source of supply in our power supply portfolio and as todd mentioned i will be putting together a document for the benefit of council to document how that works okay yes council member armature yes council member armature go ahead just for clarification so and when you say to replace it uh you mean i take it you mean not just replace it with another gas plant but with any other you know source of generation of the size that would um count for for archive uh yes ma'am that is correct uh not only um the energy that it produces but the flexibility that it provides and to replace that level of flexibility in the marketplace would require us to buy uh financial instruments or other types of assets that would be more expensive than the continued operation the deck including the debt cost okay thanks and then and then one more one more final clarification based on that so when you say uh uh flexibility is that is that considering uh the the way in which uh the cost uh of the energy it produces you know varies and influences or cause decision to to use it or not or is that just regarding you know the amount of of energy it produces its flexibility in producing at any time you know regardless of when the sun is shining when the wind is wind is blowing or is it also taking into account the cost factor does that make sense my question uh i think i can answer that question uh this way in the context of how we use the deck as a component of our overall supply portfolio if it were not there there are many different types of actions that we would have to take in managing our energy supply position every day to replace that with instruments in the market that are not asset backed and specifically a fast starting five minute starting capacity would be significantly more expensive because you would have to buy a product that would be delivering energy for the 16 hours of the day rather than just in a single five minute increment that you may need thank you and i look forward to hearing more about that when that study is out thank you terry terry before you go uh well we've got a couple other questions too but i have a question so there's a lot of talk about the deck there's a lot of talk about decommissioning the deck how i don't think we could i don't know if we've ever really said said but i know i think our debt service is over 200 million dollars on the deck is that is that a reasonable question i mean it's not i think it's over 200 yeah to over 200 million we owe that money do we not yes it's like a mortgage payment okay mayor we have to pay that regardless yeah whether we generate any energy or not and so any uh growth margin or any any revenues that we generate above the cost of production on a variable basis go to retire a portion sure no no my point is if we were to decommission the deck or just turn the deck off and never use it who pays that debt service we'd still pay it we still have an obligation to pay we being the tax that the rate payers of the city of denton is that correct correct at 17 million dollars a year closer to 18 yes sir okay just i just i just want to clarify that for the public all right councilmember melcher and then councilmember briggs you know i'll at some point we're going to get the analysis i'll hold my questions okay all right councilmember briggs my question is regarding that and it'd be easier on here because the electric performer it has the deck revenue but i don't see it under the expenditures except for the debt so is that included in the o and m expenditures and i know we have a separate one uh that was in the in the electric presentation which i just don't i have pulled up right now but i didn't see it separated out of here and i just wondered what that where it was included in this pro forma we can go ahead i'll just jump in terry we can we can provide that we do every month we do an update on the deck report and when you're looking at from a budget standpoint those expenses are mixed in a couple different lines so we really have to kind of just run it separately to show the deck performer we can show that i just think it would be really it would be more helpful for a conversation like this if it was just out there so it would be um seen that's all uh david just to just to clarify that for for council's benefit if you look at the purchase power line in the pro forma you'll note that over the next five years that purchase power expense is going down and that includes the cost uh the benefit and costs of the deck oh okay so so the the operation and maintenance for the deck is included in the purchase power the energy is the the direct o and m costs of labor is in the o and m line okay all right all right thank you uh council member armature and then mayor pro tem uh so just to briefly respond on to the point that that the mayor may that is absolutely correct that it is the rate payers who pay who pay that that debt regardless of whether it's functioning or not the reason i'm asking the question is because i think it's important for us to assess whether or not it's a sunken cost in other words whether or not in addition to that debt we already have to pay it would cost more money to continue it rather than writing it off as a loss so and that's a question um and and i don't know but i think it's a very important question to to ask to make sure that we're not just you know throwing more money at something that might be a sunk cost so it's worth investigating thank you before you respond mayor pro tem council member armature but your question does your question has been answered over and over and over again it was answered in the electrical presentation when it showed the deck revenue it showed the deck expenses it showed the debt service and it showed the delta what it didn't show alternatives what and that's what he's going to do you council sometimes i just am just at a loss of words for that type of approach quite frankly the point being what's not included in that as well is the indirect cost that you're saving which they calculated to be three to four million dollars in this last budget cycle so you can try to find all the alternatives you want i'm just simply saying that some of what you're proposing if if it's that they still have to pay 17 million dollars a year and there's and i don't think you're going to find anything that is going to say oh well we can generate enough income net income to do better than what we're doing on the deck he's going to do that analysis but we'll see but to advocate that the city that the rate payers of the city of denton somehow scrapped something that was voted on that was financed that is providing a hedge for the city of denton to pay an additional 17 million dollars a year to really get nothing is just unfathomable to me but we'll move on and mayor pro tem uh you you get to your you've got the floor yeah no so i just uh i don't know if it's who answers this david mr city manager uh terry how many employees do we have there at the deck because that's my concern is we repeatedly try to talk these people out of a job not we some of us and i just would really like to understand let's put a human element to that let's let's really conceptualize that we're saying we're advocating day after day month after month week after week that we put these people out of a job how many people work there there are 14 full-time staff people at the deck so 14 full-time fte's regularly listen to us talking about removing their place of employment okay thank you okay all right uh next slide please uh you're not on david it's very loud it's all right so here here's our our water fund pro forma and obviously um just early earlier today we had detailed presentations on the water wastewater and solid waste funds um do do want to point out on as we look at the the extended forecast here out the 2030 that we are we do have the two percent rate decrease included included here on the water fund and you can also see and as was pointed out earlier but obviously it's significant as we look at the future is our dedicated reserve as we start to plan for the for the water plant and such a significant expenditure obviously drives a lot of the conversation for this extended forecast on the water fund but we do remain within our our fund balance our our reserve targets into the out years waste water fund no no rate no rate changes um no rate decreases or increases uh projected at this time in the wastewater fund and again a strong reserve out to the out years as well um and definitely have staff to answer any questions if there are any additional ones from the presentation earlier okay any questions if you do just sort of uh say your name because i can't see everybody any questions on this all right david okay so our the last of our um of our utility funds our solid waste fund here with our with with our rate decrease included the dollar per month that that we've shown throughout the presentation um and again no you know you wanted to detail on this earlier so if you have any any questions we can we can definitely answer them at this time all right same procedure any questions all right so we'll get to some of the other funds some of our non general fund non um non-utility funds and obviously you have your budget book as well and it has detail on each of these so we'll hit them at a high level and but many of these have all have obviously been presented to you previously during the department presentations the streets fund obviously uh one of the priorities of the city over the past number of years uh i mentioned the 600,000 additional dollar additional funding that we're providing from the general fund this year that's that's been a practice for the past four uh five or six years we did pause that last year that additional transfer from franchise fees but you can see it increasing here the the 13 million 600 thousand dollar transfer up from last year's 13 million as we really look over the next number of years obviously have built up a fund balance in this fund from those transfers you can see the the plan that's being put put in place by the streets department to really ramp up the the amount of work getting done it throughout the through this fund and draw down those reserves into the out years i'll go i can go through a few of these and if there's any questions obviously come back to any of them um recreation fund this this fund obviously is a separate from the general fund but because um the general fund does send this transfer essentially subsidizing it of 4.5 million dollars um you can see here on one of the bottom lines that's funds straight from the general fund to help offset these costs but these recreation fund really intended for those programs that bring in some revenue obviously they do not pay for themselves and we had a cost of service study that came to council within the past fiscal year to talk about the the rate structure and the rate methodology for this fund the recreation fund obviously is highly impacted by um covid 19 which you again you saw this in the presentation earlier today as gary gary walked through how we reacted to it and what we're projecting for revenues and expenses and now you can see those here um for for the recreation fund itself so you know as gary mentioned they'll be every month they're going to they'll be continuing to to reassess where we are on both sides of the ledger here and we'll we'll work together to um to see how that how that impacts the recreation fund it's horse and convention fund this is um our hot and our hot and sponsorship committee still named at this point hot and sponsorship um committee uh made recommendations over the past few months we've had a number of conversations with the with the committee to get to their recommendations and you can see them here at a high level obviously our hot funds um we are projecting a decrease in a significant decrease in revenues um this fiscal year so you can see that where where we where we are with what we project from revenues to uh when in the current year here in the estimate column the 2.1 million dollars which is less than than what we had um budgeted for revenues and less than what we're expecting to expend in in the kind in the recipients in the in the contracts that we have to to spend those funds so what you what you see here is a drawdown in fund fund balance in the in the fund based on hot revenues coming in lower than expected and so that's that's where you see the 1.2 million dollars in fund balance if you go up to the next column you'll see our prior year refunds so this 482 thousand dollars is related to the expenditures the recipient expenditures that were sent out to those organizations this fiscal year that are telling us they're not going to have their event or not spend the entire amount that went to them we sent out a survey and reported back to the committee to each of those entities and asked them what their plans were how they were impacted by covid and and what their revised estimate on expenditures would be based on whether they were going to have their events or not or any other factors so taking that into account and obviously you have the detail on from each of these entities in your proposed budget but at a summary level you can see the committee's recommendation to go forward with 2.27 million in recipient expenditures next year with our conservative estimate on estimates on revenues coming in from from the hot tax and then having a slight drawdown in the fund balance but still maintaining a fund balance around a million dollars are there any questions on on this slide or any of the past couple any questions all right great so we have a number we have a number of funds throughout the city these most of these are special revenue funds some of them internal service funds well as well those special revenue funds are those funds that have a specific revenue source that has a specific use tied to them so we obviously cannot spend it on a number of things has a very specific purpose so you can see those in the first few and also we have our some internal service funds here as well showing these at a very high level we have the detail in each of your budgets as well but what we wanted to show was the the amount of fund balance we expect going into the fiscal year and then our plan to draw down any of the fund balance after taking into account the revenues and expenditures for each of those funds obviously the most significant balances we have on this fund are the parkland dedication fund and parkland development fund which gary has talked to you all about about a number of times and is part of that plan as we look forward to to land acquisition and development of our parks into the future years and continue to have those discussions related to the fees associated with those following going down the list you can see a number of those internal service funds that we touch on which you again solve those individual presentations on each of these but we do have staff available to answer any of those questions and really on those especially on the tech services material management and fleet funds but not a need to have a significant fund balance in those as a really just a transfer of funds the revenue source of the transfer from our other operating funds the risk risk retention health health funds are are tied together to some degree in the same kind of mindset that we want to keep a fund balance for those four as issues arise but we feel confident in the fund balances that we have and on the health insurance in particular again are able to not have to increase our city contribution as we move forward again this year based on having a healthy fund balance heading into the next fiscal year and a few more a few more of the the funds obviously we just talked about the street improvement fund we have our tree mitigation tree mitigation fund and rec fund that we just talked uh talked through in detail we've listed the tours here at a very high level both the downtown tours and west park tours really were more impacted by the as far as magnitude of impact those the revenues that we're going to receive in those those two funds based on the issues with the appraisal district right now then even our general fund downtown tours we have over 60 percent of our values under protest so um even even as we're showing revenues here just not not much reliability on that until we get a little bit more information but we're taking the same methodology and really even on the downtown tours only expenditure we have is against continue the down the grant program that has moved over to the downtown tours over the past couple of years and then a similar conversation with the west park tour is not quite as much outstanding under protest but we have obviously the detail on that as well David yes i'm sorry when you finish with that slide i do have a question i think i can i can probably take it down at this point the roadway impact fee fund obviously just the funds that we have there planning those for our projects associated with um with the streets okay yeah yeah if we could uh and i think i've asked for this before and i i might have missed it but um and we don't have to use this year's data but if we could take the financial plan that was originally developed with the downtown tours and it had uh you know it had it projected how much is from catalyst projects how much of it has grown from just the organic increase of existing properties what i want to do is get a pretty good analysis of here's what we thought it would do here's what we we passed the tours based upon these assumptions and these performers and i just want to sort of back check it and just go okay well we thought that it would grow this way but it's primarily grown this way and and i think you'll find as you look at the tours uh financial plan development plan it'll provide you a good template on on how to do that but i i think it's time to take a look back uh and just see if it's performing the way we thought it was was and if not how do we get it on track and if we can't then what do we do so i think it's important that we that we do that sort of data check with now that we have almost when was that put in place uh 11 or 12 and we got almost seven or eight years worth of data we can definitely go back and and tie to that and look at how they wrote this happen and obviously we've also been having those conversations with the tours board itself about the plans moving forward a strategic plan and bringing folks in so we can have that yeah i think yeah i think that i think that data in comparison to what we thought it would do and what it has done uh would would be very helpful before we before there's a deep discussion on the strategic plan yep okay thank you oh i'm sorry councilmember barmiter go ahead so two questions one about the uh the health care uh and the other about the tree fund so about the health care i was just wondering i know that that recently i don't know a couple weeks ago several weeks ago um that you know there was a a city-wide meeting with staff where people got to comment anonymously and i heard it was really productive um and and uh in getting a lot of input um nope oh did we lose councilmember barmiter our constant councilmember barmiter uh we have lost you you probably can't hear me since we've lost you so when she comes back we'll pick her question up but if we'll go ahead and we'll go ahead and move forward and when she comes back we'll go circle back around to her question and comment okay councilmember briggs did you have a question i did it's back on the streets fund right and it may have been addressed before but from 2019 and uh to 20 the outside contract services was um it says 10 000 and then it went up to 300 000 for this uh preliminary um well see i i i can speak to this at a high level and obviously if um if anyone from the streets uh departments on the line that can speak to it as well we have been um trying to utilize more those those outside um services and contract out more just to complete projects as we move forward so that's part of that plan as we try to get these projects done is utilize those services as much as we can to to complement our in-house staff so these are all contracts that come through us and that and that we approve yes yeah okay hi councilmember briggs this is ethan cox general manager of public works david's correct um as you'll recall when we were walking through the streets presentation for budget um one of the things that we're looking at with those additional influx of funds is not necessarily capital projects but uh you're leveraging some vendors and some outside services to come in and help us with some of that moderate to light maintenance so we're talking about resurfacing streets putting down crack ceiling things like that we we already use those services today really what we're looking at is just beefing that program up and making sure that we we maintain those roads that are kind of uh pardon the pun middle of the road in terms of quality and keep them from slipping into that category where we're going to have to do a large amount of reconstructs like we're doing right now with our poor and very poor streets okay okay thank you it's just that that's where it shows up in the budget i just wanted to make sure that that's what i was seeing certainly thank you all right councilmember armature you're back with us so go ahead with your question councilmember oh councilmember armature you there yes i'm so sorry yes i lost lost power my power yeah you can uh go ahead and ask your question repeat your question okay thank you so i was just going to ask um uh so uh at that meeting or on on other occasions um if the uh management has has gleaned any information about staff needs regarding health care uh or um either regarding uh you know covid health care or just in general and if we could just have a reminder of when the contract for the current health care provider comes up i know tiffany's on the line i believe we have three years left in there in that contract in term in terms of any issues with the uh during the employee sessions it's just simply a overview that we were going to be freezing um contributions this next year not making any major plan changes that sort of thing because obviously the employers are concerned about what's happening with our raises benefits that sort of thing so we answered it just kind of head on what our recommendation to you is going to be and that's what you saw today okay excellent so the health care was not part of that right okay thank you i heard it was it was a really good meeting and so um uh and then my question about the tree fund and apologies if this has been asked while i was uh setting up my my uh devices to get back on zoom um can you explain so it looks like there's a there's a zero balance now on on the tree fund how much of that has been spent on new trees and how much on tree preservation via you know land acquisition i'm gonna i'm gonna ask gary packing to um answer that if he's on the line um he's got a little bit better more up-to-date view of the tree fund than i do mayor city mayor city council this is gary packin uh we have not planted any trees at this point in time uh the last expenditure that i believe has come out of that a fund is specifically was for the mills property that ran that fund down to zero um and then we've had some uh revenue come back in i think the anticipated amount is is around 800 000 as of right now and i'll let nick provide the specifics on that um in regards to how that estimate is derived but we have not planted any trees at this point in time until the urban forest master plan was approved and council provided that direction on how that revenue was going to be allocated between land uh acquisition and tree preservation and actually tree planting thank you all right any other questions all right david you may resume do sorry it's our last it's our last slide too yeah okay all right so a summary of our of our total budget um the total budget in whole is one point one point three five million dollars um and you can see obviously a large portion of that is our capital improvement program not only the the new new new items that we're moving forward with in the cip but also those remaining projects that we're that we're moving forward with this year to complete and then you can see our general fund debt service fund and then the utilities obviously making up a large portion of our total budget so our next steps obviously we have our budget workshop today and and obviously distribution of of the budget books on next tuesday we'll be coming back to you with a consideration for a tax um our notice of tax rate and that that conversation will will lay out again where we are with avs and if there's any update on our assessed values we can bring it at that time what we'll likely ask of council and this is consistent with how we've done things in the past um regardless of the our proposed budget we have a proposed budget has a tax rate that's equal to our current tax rate we'll bring that ordinance forward with a tax rate that's a couple cents higher than about two and a half cents higher than our current tax rate so that as we go through these discussions as we continue to get information from the appraisal district we have that we give council that flexibility to make decisions and we don't set a tax rate too low in that ordinance that you don't have a decision to make as new information comes in so again we'll have more information on that next tuesday when we bring it forward but that's the mindset which is consistent with how we've done those over the past number of years and then we'll have on september 10th a public hearing on the budget and this is different from our our typical schedule and um and a new addition to the schedule moving forward this year the change in the in sp2 the change and um and based on the legislation last year requires us to have a public hearing within seven days of a tax of a budget and tax rate adoption but it it cannot be any greater than seven days so with targeting september 15th as a a budget adoption day to give us as much time as possible to react to the appraisal district we have to have a public hearing within the seven days prior to that and the tuesday prior is the day after labor day so that's why we have this thursday public hearing scheduled which is what we'll talk talk about next week on the 11th of the the notice of that public hearing moving forward so that's um that's it i know the other thing i'll say on the schedule is obviously we'll have our follow-up items continue to bring this back to council over the coming weeks as well leading up to the 15th that is all right final slide any additional questions on the budget presentation councilmember davis i just want to thank the whole organization from the top down for presenting um really a much better budget than i think most of us expected um going into the the unknowns that we have this year i mean um from in all aspects i've told todd this privately but i would use the phrase doing less with more excuse me doing more with less but that really sells a lot of people short um because we've got some phenomenal folks on staff here so um lowering utility rates even by a little bit in this climate and it's just fantastic work everybody all around fantastic any other comments or questions yes mayor uh i can't you got my video turned off there i did yeah whoever's the host is yeah a host has disabled it okay so if um anyway yep now raise my hand yeah go ahead yeah just uh you know uh a few years back there was uh a big vote around the idea of zero based budgeting and it was kind of um sort of a slavish exercise but uh the way it was generally done but what what todd and this administration has done is really that in the most kind of common sensical way to say if we had to create this organization right now to accomplish what we need to do what's the most efficient way to do it and uh boy uh doing that while you're actually running a city i think is just uh just awesome fantastic thank you councilmember melzer uh i certainly share share both of those sentiments anyone else all right we were scheduled to go to five o'clock so we've got to fill in about three hours so uh does anybody have any suggestions i'm teasing obviously all right if there's no more questions we will then stand adjourned at two oh councilmember briggs i i don't want to do that i'll wait till the next budget presentation it's not it's not that important okay all right then we will adjourn at 2 19 pm [BLANK_AUDIO]